by R Yang
I ought to go and see Aunty tomorrow. She will be so glad. Rush out to buy meat and vegetables. Chop. Chop. Stir-fry. My favorite dishes will come out of her wok one after another. "Eat this! Eat that! Eat more! "A big happy smile on her face. Loneliness still lingers in her eyes. She dares not come back to visit us. The neighbors might report her and get us into trouble. I should visit her more often.
Last time I visited her ... The thought bites like a scorpion. I can't tell anyone about it. I feel as if I've stolen something. But actually everything in that suitcase was ours! Mother's diamond wedding ring, a gold necklace, Father's German cameras, a few cherished books and records of classical music, a new Swiss watch, stuff like that. The suitcase I took to Aunty's place-it's much safer there. No one would think of raiding the home of an old woman who had been poor in the old society. Aunty was trusted by her neighborhood committee. She offered to keep the suitcase for us. But the problem was how to get it there.
Father and Mother looked at me. They said nothing. I knew what they meant. Only I could do it. I hated to do it! I did it anyway. In the street, on the bus, all eyes seemed suspicious. Everybody was watching me and the suitcase. "The eyes of the revolutionary people are bright as snow, sharp as knives." They poked holes into me. I was a paper tiger. On the outside, I was armed to the teeth, a ferocious Red Guard. But inside I was a big bag of miserable doubts and fear.
I knew what I did was wrong. Uncle Li's daughter was not so selfish. She exposed her parents. Reported everything to the Red Guards in her father's college: the things her parents said at night, the places where they hid their treasured belongings ...
"Place righteousness above family loyalty." That was what she did. "Drop rocks on those who have fallen into a well. " That was also what she did. What she did was actually what her father had taught her to do over the years. "Believe the Party more than anyone else. Be loyal to it no matter what happens. Love Chairman Mao more than your parents ... "
Uncle Li was Party secretary of the college before he was "pulled down from the horse. " An expert in political and thought work. I think it was his fault that his daughter betrayed her family. Now he and his wife hate her more than anyone else. They should be proud of her! I admire her for her courage, knowing I'll never be able to do such a thing. I'm a hypocrite. I have to admit it. But I would rather be a hypocrite than a fool!
Chairman Mao and my parents, who do I love more? Hmmm. This is a tough question. Honestly, I think I love Chairman Mao more than my parents. For example, if Chairman Mao, my parents, and I were sitting in an airplane about to crash and we only had one parachute, I'd definitely give it to Chairman Mao. Let my parents and myself be blown to pieces in a gigantic ball of fire. We'd all be glad. Or suppose we were on a sinking boat in the middle of an ocean with only one life jacket, I'd put it on Chairman Mao. My parents and I would go down to the stomachs of the sharks, with a proud smile. But now Chairman Mao is safe in the big yard called Zhongnanhai, while my parents are in trouble. I've got to help them too. They are not against Chairman Mao and his revolutionary line. In fact, they got themselves into trouble because they took the idea of the Cultural Revolution seriously.
Last year Father and Mother had no enemies. Students liked them. Colleagues were friendly, partly because my parents did not compete with them for promotion, housing, and other things. "Vigorously withdraw from the rapids"-that was Father's philosophy. Mother accepted it, although somewhat reluctantly. Because of this, many of Father's old friends who became capitalist-roaders last year said he was truly wise.
Wise? Humph! Not when he and Mother criticized the leaders of their college at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Doing that, they got categorized as rebels. Half the people at the college became their mortal enemies. For these people, nothing short of our blood being drained and our bodies cut into ten thousand pieces would satisfy them.
To reach their goal, those colleagues of my parents dug up old dirt and created new rumors. Formed special-case groups. The members went to places all over China to investigate my parents. It made no difference whether they were in power or not. If not capitalist-roaders, people could still be made into "black hands" (wirepullers), renegades, counterrevolutionaries, foreign spies ... Many caps are handy.
One fact that gave us comfort was that my parents had no historical problems. Mother was a progressive student in Yanjing University before Liberation. Father was really lucky that he got sent to Yan'an instead of back to Beijing to do underground work. As an underground worker, one may lose touch with the Party or get arrested. In those cases, how could he prove he wasn't a renegade or a Nationalist spy? And if he couldn't convince others he was innocent, he'd be assumed guilty. That's why many of Father's old friends were in trouble. Some were arrested, had to face the method of bi gong xin (compulsion-confessioncredence).
Yan'an was a much safer place. Many people knew Father. They could testify that he had never left the liberated area. Never lost touch with the Party. Never got arrested . . . How can one find a bone in an egg? But wait! If people use the method of bi gong xin, they can find anything they want in an egg: bullets, daggers, guns, transmitterreceivers ... You name it.
Yan'an, who says it was safer? Knowing too many people has already caused Father big troubles. In Yan'an, Ye Jianying was his boss. Wang Guangmei was his colleague and Furen fellow graduate. Wu Xiuquan had introduced Mother to him. The list goes on and on. Never mind that Father and Mother weren't in touch with any of them after they became VIPs. Members of special-case groups for these people came, magnifying glass in hand, looking for clues to historical problems.
Tell them the truth? Some of them just got mad as hell. Banging on the table. Stamping on the floor. A thin closed door could not prevent Lian and me from overhearing what went on inside Father's room. Father was amiable and patient. His interrogators' voices loud and furious. "We warn you! Give us straight answers! Try to shield renegades and capitalist-roaders, you will come to no good end! Mind your dog head!" Bang! Bang!
So much pressure gets put on Father to lie about his old comrades. Mount Tai is light compared with it. What will Father do? He is determined.
"I have to tell the truth," he told me. "I cannot make things up for them. Fuzzy evidence, irresponsible answers given under such circumstances will kill people! Destroy their families! I cannot do that. I am a Communist Party member. I have to be responsible to the Party. But if I insist on telling the truth, I may have to pay a price. You may have to pay a price too. A big price, Rae. Do you understand?"
Yes, I do! Even so, you are still my hero, Father. I admire your courage and integrity. But will others tell the truth about you too? When the Red Guards from your college put pressure on them, what will they say? If they tell half-truths or make up stories to please these people and save their own skin, we are finished. A huge ax is hanging over our heads by a single silk thread. It may fall any day, at any moment. I dread the moment. I am waiting for it. Day and night.
Red Guards come. In a large number. Bang! Bang! Bang! The noise wakes up everybody. "Open the door!" "Hurry up!" "Hurry up!" Try to stay calm. Fear will only make things worse. The door opens. A crowd swarms in. Belts are unbuckled. Ropes and handcuffs. Search warrant? No need for it. Somebody has confessed something. The law no longer protects us. Pull the drawers out. Open the trunks. Throw everything on the floor. They arrest Father. They arrest me. Take us to a prison van. The kind we see in movies, vans used by the Nationalists before Liberation. "Farewell, Mother! Farewell, my dear fellow countrymen! Don't weep! Lift up your heads! Darkness will soon be over! ... "
Darkness. I'm submerged in it. The dungeon is pitch-black. Smell of blood. Am I blind? Torture ... All kinds of it. It's too much for me to bear. A body of flesh and blood. Yet I must endure it all so my comrades will be safe.
"I have to tell the truth! I cannot make things up ...
"I'll never tell you the secret! I won't betray my comrades!"
They torture me in f
ront of Father. They torture Father ... I torture ... Father ... I'm losing consciousness. I'm blind. I'm falling from a mountaintop into an abyss. Light as a feather. Whirling down. Unsettling air flows. Dizziness ... Sleep ...
"The east is red. The sun rises. China ... Mao Zedong ...
Oh. Miserable! Just as I was about to fall asleep, this damn song starts. At five thirty! Every day. Seven days a week ... Never gives anybody a break ... I hate this song now! I used to love it ... Things change into their opposites ... Red Guards. Class enemies ... I wonder if any counterrevolutionary can match me in hating this song. It's not music. It's torture! Pouring out of a loudspeaker in a pine tree just outside my bedroom window. It drives me crazy! Are there bedrooms in this college that don't have loudspeakers blaring into them? Guess not.
At daybreak, the whole college was drowned in this deafening music. Teachers, students, workers, their families, all were forced to wake up. Other colleges and universities in Beijing were pretty much the same. When "the east is red," everybody had to get up except a few leaders, such as Chairman Mao himself.
The broadcast, once it started, would not stop for at least two hours. The network news followed the song. Then local news, all kinds of announcements, declarations, orders, ultimatums, selected dazibao ... It went on and on.
Cover my head with the quilt. Put it under the pillow. Nothing worked. The sound drilled into my ears, turning my brain into a battlefield where the persistent sound waves and my drowsiness fought a bloody battle. Such a headache. Fire burning in my heart. My sanity was wearing thin.
"Down with so and so!"
"Smash the dog head of so and so!"
Wish I could smash that cursed loudspeaker! Trample it flat. Kick it over the wall. It'd be silent then. Lying there like an abandoned chamberpot rotting away in a ditch ...
"Working class. Seize the power!"
"Revolutionary people ... Heighten your vigilance!"
"Guard against ... sabotage ... class enemies ... "
If they catch me smashing the loudspeaker, I know they'll seize me. An active counterrevolutionary. Caught red-handed. Public trial rallies. Parades. Execution ... Who cares? After that, ping! All would be quiet. A dead person hears no songs. Eternal sleep will be mine. How sweet!
The Red Guard commander in this college, why did he of all people commit suicide? It was a mystery. No one knew the answer. Some said he had very bad insomnia. It must have driven him crazy. So he, an intelligent young man of twenty-one who commanded a thousand invincible Red Guards in this college, jumped off the roof of the main building on campus. On a gorgeous morning. In front of a staring crowd. He leaped up into a rosy sky and came down in a perfect diving posture, as if he were competing for an Olympic gold medal. The posture he kept until he touched the concrete sidewalk seventy feet below. Everybody who saw it said it was incredible.
He broke his arms. He broke his head. He broke his neck and spine. Blood drowned him from the inside. But he did not die immediately. He gasped and groaned. Sweat of pain poured out of his body. They rushed him to a hospital, where he died a couple of hours later. It must have been hell in those two hours, before he got his sleep at last.
I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil himself if he can teach me how to silence that loudspeaker. Loose contact? A wire broken from the inside? Pull the magnet out? ... How to climb up that tree? When is the best time to do it? After midnight, when there is no moon? "Set fire in high wind. Murder when the moon is black. " My great-grand father and grandfather. Capitalists and vampires. Teach me your bloody tricks!
A thousand ideas spun in my head. Many were crazy. All were futile. Luckily I still had some common sense left in me so I did not put these ideas into practice. Two hours later, the broadcast would break through the defense line of my drowsiness. I got up. Head heavy and feet light. Eyes sour as vinegar. Another day ruined before it began.
16
"The Hero, Once Departed,
Will Never Come Back"
Insomnia tormented me for a year and a half. By June 1968 I couldn't take it anymore. I must do something about it, I said. This something was to volunteer to go to a farm in the northeast, at a place known as the Great Northern Wilderness.
I use the word "volunteer" because unlike those who graduated from middle schools in the following years, in 1968 we still had a choice: those who did not want to leave Beijing could stay. But the jobs awaiting them were not glorious: mending shoes, fixing bikes, cleaning streets, selling soybean milk and fried dough, things like that. And the co-workers in such work units were mostly illiterate old men and women, the typical "petty city dwellers." Up to the eyes in gossip from morning till night. Chicken feathers and garlic skins. Storms in a teacup ... This was the future I had dreaded. I thought I said good-bye to it when I was accepted by 1o1. Who would have thought that five years later, it turned up again as the only alternative I had other than going to the Great Northern Wilderness.
So I volunteered to go to the Great Northern Wilderness. In my mind it was a mysterious and exciting place. Vast stretch of virgin land. Boundless pine forest on snowy mountains. Log cabins. Campfires. Hunting and skiing. Wild animals. Hidden enemies. Spies sneaked across the border from the Soviet Union at night. Combat of life and death ...
Death? I can take it! Better die as a hero than live through those endless nights. Recently I'm afraid my illness is getting worse. It drives me crazy. These days my parents get on my nerves. Lian and Yue both irritate me. I don't belong to this home anymore. I'm wasting my time here. I should leave. The sooner the better.
I embarked on the journey on July 15, 1968. A day I will never forget. Everybody in my family went to Beijing train station to see me off. Father, Mother, Lian, and Yue came from the western suburb. Aunty from her own home in the city. Several classmates of mine came too. Wu, of course, was not among them. I don't remember who these classmates were except two girls who were from workers' families. Their parents, who were more practical than ours, had persuaded them to stay in Beijing.
On that day, the train was filled to capacity by young people like me. Probably over a thousand. All were going to the Great Northern Wilderness. The platform next to our train was even more crowded, swarming with family members, friends, classmates. As the time for the train to leave drew near, some began to cry. Among my classmates, the two girls who were going to stay in Beijing were crying their eyes out.
What do they think they're doing? Are they crying because they can't bear to part with me? This I can hardly believe. They are making a scene in front of all these people. Why? Maybe they're really crying for themselves? Think of the mediocrity in store for them. The missed adventures and opportunities for heroism. Anyway I don't like them to weep for me. I don't like them to weep for themselves in front of me either. It is embarrassing. I don't know how to respond to this.
So I turned my eyes away from them to look at the sky. It was a bright sunny day. Not a trace of cloud. Numerous red flags were flying in the air. Drums and gongs were making such a din that I could hardly hear anybody. But that was just fine. I did not want to hear anybody.
In a split second, I was far away, in a different world. A scene spread out in front of my eyes, one that took place more than two thousand years ago.
The wind is howling hsiao-hsiao; the water of Yi River is cold. The hero, once departed, will never come back.
The great hero Jing Ke was singing on the bank of Yi River. He had just left the capital of Yan state, which was located near where Beijing is today. Among those who went to see him off were the crown prince of Yan state and Jing Ke's good friend Gao Jianli. They were all wearing white robes, the color of mourning. They knew that Jing Ke would not come back from the expedition. He was going to Xianyang to assassinate the mighty king of Qin state, a notorious tyrant in Chinese history.
On the riverbank, the reed catkins were as white as snow. The wind was wild. Gao Jianli struck up the lute. Jing Ke improvised the song. Tears streamed down from
the eyes of the company. Jing Ke was the only one who did not cry. After he finished the song, he mounted the carriage and drove off. He never looked back.
This story I read in Shiji before the Cultural Revolution. It left me with a deep impression. Like Jing Ke, I won't come back either, once I depart. In history Jing Ke sacrificed his life in an attempt to rescue the people from the tyranny of Qin. His body was chopped to pieces by the ferocious bodyguards of the king, who later conquered the entire country and called himself Qin Shi Huangdi. Today our sacrifice is made for a much greater cause: we will build a society that is unprecedented in human history. Unlike all other societies in which there were upper and lower classes-as Mencius said, "Those who work with their minds govern people. Those who work with their bodies are governed by people"-in our society, educated city youths will go to the countryside voluntarily so that children of peasants will have opportunities to attend universities. Eventually the gap between cities and rural areas will disappear. Probably not in our generation. In that sense, we are the losers. But being a loser of this type is an honor. History will remember our generation, as it does the Long March soldiers.
The bell rang. My thoughts were cut short. Last three minutes. The train was ready to leave. Aunty could not hold it any longer. So far she had been trying to put on a smiling face for me to remember in the years to come. Now her face began to crack in spite of her effort to control it. Tears streamed from her eyes. Silent torrential tears. Leaning against Lian's shoulders, suddenly she looked so old, so helpless. She stretched out one hand toward me, as if she wanted to grab me from the train, at the last moment ...