by Weijian Shan
From the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 until the end of the 1950s, China maintained a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union and the countries of the Eastern Europe part of the Soviet bloc. But around 1959, ties with the Soviets began to fray. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev spoke critically of Mao’s policies during the Great Leap Forward, including the large-scale collectivization of farming—known as the people’s commune system—that eliminated farmers’ private ownership of land. Mao also suspected that Khrushchev was trying to bring China into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, as it had with the rest of the Eastern Bloc countries. During a state visit to Beijing, Khrushchev proposed that China and the Soviet Union establish a joint navy fleet, a proposal Mao considered a disguised means of Soviet control of China. He thought that Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership had betrayed the doctrines of Marxism and Leninism by denouncing Joseph Stalin and by promoting “peaceful coexistence” with the West. In 1960, to put pressure on Beijing to toe the Soviet line in international affairs, the Soviet Union abruptly canceled all economic aid programs to China, withdrew all its technical personnel, and demanded the immediate repayment of the debts incurred by China during the Korean War. All these moves dealt a heavy blow to China’s development and exacerbated its economic woes just as the country was struggling to cope with the disasters of the Great Leap Forward.
After 1960, the split between China and the USSR was complete. Beijing officially labeled the Soviets “revisionists” who had betrayed the true tenets of Marxism and Leninism. The relationship between the two countries grew ever more hostile. After its split with the USSR, China became almost completely isolated, with its only ally the tiny Balkan country of Albania, which unequivocally sided with China in the ideological fight within the socialist camp.
Mao despised Khrushchev for his efforts to reduce tensions with the West, especially the United States. After an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace, Khrushchev’s attempts to improve relations with the United States suffered a severe setback. In 1962, as the United States and the Soviet Union almost turned the Cold War into a hot one during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mao remained scornful of Khrushchev’s conduct. He was an “opportunist” for stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba in the first place, Mao declared, and a “capitulationist” for withdrawing the missiles under US threat. (At the time the quid pro quo, in which President John F. Kennedy agreed to withdraw US nuclear arms from Turkey, was not disclosed; Khrushchev had gotten something from the United States after all.)
* * *
I started school in autumn 1960, when I was about to turn seven years old. On the first day of school, my mother put some nice clothes on me and gave me a multicolored cloth schoolbag, which she had probably sewn together herself, as a real schoolbag would have been quite expensive. I thought the bag was too girlish and was afraid I would be laughed at. I made a fuss, refused to take it, and asked instead for a real, green-colored schoolbag like everyone else was carrying. My mother insisted I take the one she made until I threatened to throw it away as soon as she was out of sight. I did not really mean it, but I also knew she feared I might follow through on my threat. She gave in and got me a real schoolbag.
The Elementary School for Children of the Ministry of Foreign Trade was located in the western suburbs of Beijing, about 40 minutes away from our home by bus. The schoolyard was very big to my eyes. There was a redbrick two-story building in the center, a soccer field and playground to the south side of the building, and a canteen on the north side separated from the main building by a road and an open space.
The elementary school was relatively new, built in 1955. It was a boarding school, so we spent the week at the school, going home only for Sundays.
My sister, Weimin, who is one year older than me and whom my parents had left in the care of our maternal grandmother, arrived from Shandong to live with us. She ended up going to a day school two blocks away from our home.
In many ways, the children who went to boarding schools like ours were privileged. The school was well funded by the ministry to make sure that we received a first-rate education, and we were well taken care of. During the day, we had regular teachers for classes ranging from mathematics and Chinese to arts, music, and physical education. In our spare time and in the evenings, “daily-life” teachers took over to make sure that we washed ourselves, changed our clothes, and went to bed at specific hours. They even came around every night with a chamber pot to help those who still wet their beds. Other than studying, we never worried about anything at all.
Every week, we went home by school bus on Saturday after lunch and returned to school on Sunday before dinner. Every Saturday I was excited to go home. I was just as reluctant to return to school on Sundays.
The school bus dropped us off inside the entrance of the ministry. Every Saturday, after getting off the bus, I went to the office of either my mother or father to wait for them to finish work and take me home.
My father had a modest-size office, but he had a swivel chair. I twirled around and around in one direction until it would go no further. Then I would twirl in the other direction. My father’s desk drawer was usually messy, but I enjoyed finding something in it to play with, like a lighter or even an invitation card for certain events. When my parents finished their work, they would often take me to the canteen to have dinner or buy food before we went home together. I loved the ice cream there.
* * *
I was assigned to classroom no. 1. There were about 30 pupils in the class, half boys and half girls. The classrooms and dormitories were in the main building, classrooms on the first floor and dormitories on the second. All the boys in my class slept in one big room with 15 or 16 beds. There was a big common washroom and a common bathroom on each side of the floor, one on the boys’ side and one on the girls’ side.
Most of my classmates were several months older than me; we were all six or seven years of age. It did not feel hard to live away from home, even at that young age, and soon I became quite used to the routine of living together with other children. The daily-life caretaker I remember most clearly was Zhou Xiuchun. Adults called her Ah Chun. We called her Auntie Zhou. Short and hunchbacked, she always looked severe. I never saw her smile, not even once. All of us thought she was scary. She would punish in her own way whoever got into trouble with her. I managed to avoid her wrath and never got into trouble with her, thankfully.
Once she got angry with all of us, probably because she caught some of us being naughty for something I don’t remember. That night in the study room after dinner, she announced she would punish us all by requiring us to copy one chapter in our language-study textbook 100 times. Nobody could leave the classroom to go to bed before finishing.
She sat in a chair at the door to check our work and would not allow us to leave the classroom until she was satisfied with our work. One chapter in the elementary textbook was probably one or two pages long in big characters. To write 100 pages would be a lot of work. It was unbearably tedious. We collectively moaned but we had no choice. I was writing as fast as I could but there seemed no end to it. Finally, I decided to take a shortcut. I knew she would not read more than a few characters. So I began to copy only the first and last few sentences of the text each time and soon I was done. She took a quick look at my neat writing and her facial muscles relaxed. She praised my work and let me out. My classmates all raised their heads to watch me leave. They were astonished I could write so fast. I enjoyed a good evening to myself as my classmates labored away. I didn’t consider what I did cheating because I thought she was unjust and unfair, and she deserved to be tricked even though I loved her in general. I have defied authorities from time to time in my life when I thought the authority was stupidly unfair with its demands.
Auntie Zhou was also in charge of our personal hygiene. She was strict and never wavered in her requests. We were required to wash our face, hands, and feet every day before bed. There
was no hot water in the washroom, but the rumor in the boys’ dormitory was that the girls were provided hot water in their washbasins to wash their butts. All the boys hated washing, especially in wintertime when the water was stingingly cold.
Auntie Zhou would sit at the entrance of the washroom to check our hands and feet to make sure we had cleaned ourselves well. She would send us back to rewash ourselves if we did not pass her test. But she would only check one hand and one foot. Therefore, I often washed only one hand and one foot to pass her examination and to save myself the unpleasantness of the freezing water.
For all her sternness, Auntie Zhou took good care of us. Some boys still wet their beds. So every night, during the wee hours, she would come into our room with a chamber pot and a flashlight, repeatedly calling the likely offenders in a loud voice in her Shanghai dialect, to wake them up to pee one by one.
There was a public bath in the back of the schoolyard. We were required to take a bath every week. All the boys would line up naked to go through a pool of steaming hot water. Auntie Zhou stood on the side of the pool and washed each of us one by one thoroughly with a towel soaked with soap. After she was done, we each looked like a cooked prawn (I did not know there was such a thing as lobster at that time). We would proceed to the next pool to rinse ourselves off.
We had our three meals a day in the school canteen. Despite the famine in the country and the food shortage in Beijing, we always had enough to eat. Though I knew food was rationed, I only became aware of the catastrophic scope of the Great Famine later in life. Even though I was not picky about food, I knew the menu was simple and rarely changed from week to week. I still do not like ribbonfish, seaweed, or carrots, because these were served so often in those years I became literally fed up with them.
I later learned we owed our food supply to Principal Li, who worked tirelessly and went out of her way to use her connections at high levels to ensure there was enough food for her pupils. From time to time, we were each given some vegetables and other kinds of food to bring home on Saturdays, because every family in the school was short of food.
At one time, the school canteen served the meat of “yellow goat,” or wild Mongolian gazelle. The gazelles used to roam, in great numbers, throughout the grasslands on the Loess Plateau, which extends from Gansu Province in the west through Ningxia, Shanxi, and Shaanxi Provinces into Inner Mongolia. During the Great Famine, the gazelles were hunted for their meat. Many organizations in Beijing sent special teams to Inner Mongolia to join the hunt. They were armed with rifles and rode in jeeps equipped with spotlights for night hunting. Trucks brought gazelle carcasses back some 700 kilometers (~430 miles) to Beijing. I saw truckloads of the stocky, fawn-colored animals arriving in the compound where we lived and at our school.
The organized hunt was a catastrophe for the animals, as they were slaughtered by the thousands. I think the hunt made these animals almost extinct and it stopped only because they could not be found anymore. As this hunt took place on the Chinese side of the border with Mongolia, the gazelles were able to maintain their range in Mongolia, and their numbers have gradually recovered.
* * *
The head teacher of my class was Ma Yaxian, a tall and elegant woman with smooth skin and dark hair. She was from Shanghai and spoke the same Shanghainese dialect as Auntie Zhou. She stayed with us from the day we started until we left elementary school. She taught us all subjects, except physical education and music. Teacher Ma was always patient and kind to students. Every day she taught us how to read and write and, in later grades, more advanced language and calligraphy. She would put a red circle on each of the characters we wrote if she approved of the calligraphy. I tried to get as many red circles as possible on my character worksheet.
Each day, there were classes in the morning. We studied Chinese language, including classical Chinese, writing and brush calligraphy, arithmetic, and geography. We all went to the canteen for lunch. After lunch, there was one hour of nap time back in the dormitory. Auntie Zhou walked around to make sure we were quiet and sleeping before sitting down by the door to do her knitting. In the tall trees outside the windows of our dormitory floor, cicadas chirped loudly, especially when the sun was bright. In summertime we napped with the loud and constant choir of cicadas droning in the background.
Afternoons were devoted to less important subjects, such as arts and music. Classes ended with physical education. Boys frequently played soccer in the full-size soccer field. The girls did something else, but whatever it was I wasn’t paying attention.
There was a school clinic on the first floor of the main building, which was attended by a nurse. I was frail as a child and was frequently sick, typically with a headache for no particular reason I, or any doctor, could ascertain. So I occasionally spent time lying on the bed of the clinic chatting with the nurse. She asked me what I aspired to do when I grew up. I told her my ambition was to become a zookeeper, so I could see and take care of all kinds of animals. Alas, my ambition remains unfulfilled.
* * *
Elementary school was a breeze. I never felt learning was difficult and I was a good student. I usually received full marks. All the marks and grades were published for all the students to see, so everyone knew who was a good student and who wasn’t. I do not remember anyone being bothered by that system of transparency or no privacy, maybe because I didn’t have anything to worry about. Not until I went to graduate school did I notice that US schools do not publicly disclose all grades for all students. In the Old China, the results of imperial exams were also published for all to see. I suppose it was the same tradition when it came to our school. Those students who did not do well were frequently required to do make-up homework. I was quick with my schoolwork, so I was usually among the first ones to finish and go out to play.
There was not much effort to teach the kids to be creative at our school. I don’t remember doing creative projects or making anything, with the exception of art classes. For drawing, we went to the nearby Beijing Zoo and painted animals. I remember painting a tiger together with one of my classmates, Liu Wanyi. I had no sense of three dimensions or perspectives. So my tiger looked like a squashed omelet whereas his looked like, well, a tiger, with its head and tail in the right proportions.
During summer and winter breaks, we would be sent home. Summer vacation was about one-and-a-half months. Winter break was much shorter, just a couple of weeks long. We would be assigned daily homework covering the whole summer. I would finish all my assignments within the first three or four days, so I did not have to worry about it for the rest of the summer. My parents never supervised or helped with my homework. It was not necessary, but it also seemed to me that in those days teachers did not expect parents to help their children with teaching and homework as they do today.
After I had learned enough characters, my parents bought or borrowed small illustrated storybooks. They were no bigger than the size of my two palms and the best ones told stories with characters from Chinese classics such as the Monkey King and General Yue Fei fighting invaders from the kingdom of Jin. Each page was a picture vividly depicting a scene from the story with captioned words below. I loved them. I would be absorbed in these stories throughout the summer. I suppose kids today get the same satisfaction by watching television dramas, but in my opinion, they don’t read enough. Nothing ignites the imagination more than good stories complemented with illustrations that bring characters and events vividly to life.
My friends and I also went to public swimming pools to escape Beijing’s summer heat. They were usually packed. My parents bought me a life preserver, a flotation device like a thick rubber belt, which was a big expenditure for them. I was proud to own it and learned how to swim with it.
A lake called Yuyuantan was located not far away from our school, and I went there with some friends to swim. There was a wooden platform in the middle of the lake and people swam back and forth between the beach and the platform. I had just learned to swim but I cou
ld not swim well, or for long. I swam with friends, with the life preserver around my waist, to the platform. Then someone took my life preserver and left for the shore.
I was stranded on the platform with only one friend, a boy named Gao Jianjing, and I did not think I could make it back to the shore without my life preserver. We waited and waited until it was getting late. So I decided to try to swim back without the preserver. Halfway to the shore, I was completely exhausted and I began to sink. I only had strength left to yell “help!” Gao swimming next to me was yelling for someone to help me as well. But as I still managed to keep my head above water, people around us at first did not think there was an emergency. Fortunately, a strong swimmer came to my rescue just when I was about to drown, and soon a boat came alongside us. That, I suppose, was my rite of passage for swimming; after that I did not need my life preserver anymore.