by Weijian Shan
* * *
My love of reading continued as I grew older, and I began to read more extracurricular stuff. I particularly loved popular science books written for children. There was a series titled One Hundred Thousand Whys that was like an encyclopedia. I learned why daytime was long in summer but short in winter, why there were seasons, why airplanes could fly, why ice was slippery, and why water pipes might burst in cold weather. I learned most of my science at an early age from those books. I also remember another book, Scientists Talk About the 21st Century. It was a collection of articles written for children by well-known scientists who envisioned the world of the next hundred years. It talked about wireless communication, supersonic jet travel, nuclear energy, semiconductors, electronics, and agriculture without soil. I was also fascinated by popular books on astronomy, man-made satellites, and space travel.
I enjoyed science fiction, too. I was particularly fond of the translated works of the French author Jules Verne. I was mesmerized by his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and my mind followed Captain Nemo in the depths of the sea in his submarine, the Nautilus, all over the world.
I dipped my toes into applied science by joining the Children’s Palace of Science and Technology when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. This was a permanent establishment, but it functioned like a camp. It offered activities in science and technology for a couple of hours per week to a select group of a few hundred students, mostly teenagers. I was accepted even though I was an elementary school student, probably with a recommendation from my school. I think they made exceptions for some younger students considered to have potential in science. Each of us joined one of the specialized groups in the camp, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, telecommunications, and wireless control (which built models of wirelessly controlled boats and airplanes, now called drones). I joined the wireless communication group.
The camp was located in Beihai Park. Beihai means “North Sea.” The beginning of the park traced back to the Jin dynasty rulers in 1179. It was progressively built up over the centuries by various ruling dynasties as part of the imperial park. It occupies an area of about 70 hectares (∼170 acres), half of which was a man-made lake. There is a tall hill in the middle of the lake with many ancient temples, palaces, pavilions, and buildings scattered around its slopes. On the very top of the hill, overlooking the city, stands a very large white Tibetan Buddhist pagoda.
On the north bank of the lake, there are five large pavilions by the water, collectively known as the Five Dragon Pavilions. Next to the pavilions but standing in the middle of nothing is Nine Dragons Wall, a large wall of green- and blue-glazed tiles with the pattern of nine yellow dragons on it. Behind the Five Dragon Pavilions there are stone stairs leading up to what used to be a temple by the name of Chanfusi, or Enlightened Happiness Temple. The temple occupied a large area with many buildings, some of which were burned down or collapsed long ago, but a few remained standing. That was the site of the science camp and all camp activities took place inside what used to be the temple. It was secluded, spacious, and beautiful. Not only was there much open space outside the buildings, but also it was right by the lake where the remote-control group would sail their model boats and fly their model planes. There was even a small hydropower plant built by the students near there.
The membership card for the science camp allowed us to go in and out of Beihai Park freely, without having to pay the two-fen entrance fee. On camp days, I would take a trolley bus from our school to Beihai. Past the entrance, there was a long but pleasant walk along the lake to get to the camp. The lake bank was lined with willow trees whose long, thin, hanging branches provided shade for visitors. Under the willows, people sat by the lake with fishing rods. The lake was stocked with fat carp, and for a fee people could fish there.
I learned to build a radio in science camp. We started with a simple crystal radio. It required only a small crystal encased in a tiny glass tube with two wires sticking out and some simple connectors and an earphone. It received broadcast signals without the need for any power. Once we mastered the crystal radio, we advanced to building radios with diodes. Finally, we began to build radios with transistors. There were no integrated circuit boards at that time, so all the transistors, diodes, and batteries had to be connected with wires and resistors that we soldered together ourselves.
It gave me a feeling of accomplishment once my hand-built radio worked. At the time, the best commercially sold radios I knew of had eight transistors. The most sophisticated one I attempted to build, with the help of a friend, was a six-transistor radio. In 1971, the first-generation Intel processor had 2,300 transistors. Today, a single microchip can have a transistor count in the billions. This kind of processing power was beyond imagination when I soldered my first single transistor on a board.
* * *
Back in school, I got into trouble for the first time in my life. I was walking one day in the hallway of the main building, and I passed some girls jumping rope. The girl jumping swung her thick wool scarf around her neck and it hit me in the eye. I was startled and annoyed, so I pushed her and walked by. It turned out she was a tattletale and soon I was hauled into the office of the director of school affairs, Mr. Huang Liqun.
Mr. Huang would not listen to my explanation and suspended me from class. I became upset and poured ink onto his desk. The next thing I knew, my mother showed up. She had been summoned by phone by Mr. Huang and she had to find someone with a motorcycle equipped with a sidecar to take her to our school. She collected me and took me home by bus. I was afraid I was in big trouble. If my father heard of this, he probably would spank me.
Instead of punishing me, my mother took me to a Shanghai-style restaurant close to our home. It was the first time in my memory I ever ate in a restaurant. I don’t think my parents could afford to eat in restaurants. I thought the food was delicious, like nothing I had tasted before.
To this day, I don’t know why my mother did not punish me. I could only guess she knew that by personality I would not yield to punishment, but I would give in to a soft approach. Indeed, I felt so guilty to have brought shame to my mother that I was determined not to repeat silly behaviors like this.
The school, however, disciplined me with one demerit in my record. I thought Mr. Huang was unfair because he refused to hear my side of the story. I decided to be defiant. During one class, I stood up while the teacher was lecturing and left the classroom by jumping out of the window (as I mentioned, the classrooms were on the first floor). My classmates were shocked that I pulled such a stunt. The school, however, did not punish me further. I think the school authorities must have calculated that another demerit so immediately after the first one would only demonstrate such penalties were ineffective or counterproductive. I ended my resistance movement and went back to class the next day.
Other than this incident, I was a good student, consistently earning top grades. I loved school and most of my teachers. Probably for these reasons, the school authority let me off the hook lightly and ignored my defiance after giving me that one demerit. But I was worried that the demerit in my record would affect my chances for the best middle school I was aspiring to attend. It turned out that my worry was unnecessary, because soon my entire school record would become completely irrelevant and would never be referred to again in my life.
Chapter 3
Storm of Revolution
At the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao envisioned a new and inclusive government for the country. Its representatives would be two-thirds “Communists and progressives” and one third “independents and rightists.” Mao became president and Zhou Enlai the premier. Two of the four vice premiers and 14 of the 34 cabinet members were non-Communists, including a few left-leaning Nationalists and members of other political parties, many of whom had sided clandestinely with the Communist cause during the civil war out of disgust with the corruption endemic to the old regime.
But this honeymoon did not
last long. In 1957, the leadership of the Communist Party launched a “self-rectification campaign” aimed at cleansing itself of “bureaucrat-ism, faction-ism and subjectivism.” While the campaign was supposed to be internal to the Party, leading intellectuals and the general public were invited to help the Party by criticizing it. Mao, in his characteristic way, described the policy as “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.”
For a while, government-controlled newspapers came as close as they would ever get to becoming forums of free speech, as prominent figures inside and outside the Communist Party were encouraged to express their views, ranging from mild advocacy for democracy and inclusiveness to harsh criticisms of one-party rule and the Party’s failed policies.
To Mao, the chorus of criticism went too far. Concerned it would threaten the rule of the Party, he and his comrades swiftly launched a counterattack, known as the “Anti-Rightist Movement,” to purge those they perceived as hostile to their rule. At the end of the campaign, more than one million people, including many prominent scholars, writers, scientists, and social activists, were tarred as “rightist” counterrevolutionaries or enemies of the people. They were demoted, exiled, or, in some cases, jailed. They would not be officially rehabilitated until 20 years later, after Mao’s death. By then their lives and those of their families had already been ruined.
The Anti-Rightist Movement silenced dissenting voices outside of the Communist Party, but it could not eliminate dissent entirely. In 1959, Mao purged the defense minister Peng Dehuai for criticizing his policies of the Great Leap Forward. After that, hardly anyone among the Party’s senior leadership dared to disagree with Mao.
But not everyone agreed with him either. The failure of the Great Leap Forward was a wake-up call for those within the Party who might have thought Mao could do no wrong.
In 1962, Mao handed the task of running the country to Liu Shaoqi, his no. 2 and chosen successor. Liu was a Mao loyalist and a pragmatic leader. He stabilized the economy and helped it recover, but as his stature grew, Mao must have felt his own authority was being challenged—not only by Liu but also by the rest of the leadership and the entire government, which had fallen in line with Liu’s policies.
According to the principles of Marxism, the Communist-led revolution was a struggle by the working class against the capitalist and landowning classes. For Mao, however, this struggle did not end with the triumph of socialism. Not only did the members of the old ruling class still exist, but the capitalist ideas still pervaded traditions and culture. Khrushchev, Mao believed, had abandoned the principles of Marxism; Russia had become a “revisionist” country in which capitalist ideas persisted in the Soviet leadership. Capitalist ideas could corrupt anyone in the leadership, Mao believed; even senior leaders could become agents of class enemies within the Party. Therefore, he was ever vigilant that a Chinese Khrushchev, whose name was now synonymous with revisionism, would emerge within the Chinese Communist Party. He suspected, in fact, that such a leader already existed.
Mao was an accomplished student of history. In 1959, before the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he spoke admiringly of a historical figure, a sixteenth-century official named Hai Rui, who he suggested could serve as a role model in daring to tell the truth in defiance of authorities. Hai Rui was unflinchingly loyal to the Ming emperor, but he was also willing to sharply criticize the emperor for his misdeeds. In doing so, he provoked the emperor’s rage and faced almost certain death and was spared only by the emperor’s own unexpected but timely demise. Heeding Mao’s call, a vice mayor of Beijing named Wu Han, who was also an acclaimed historian of the Ming dynasty, wrote an opera in 1960 titled The Firing of Hai Rui in tribute to his daring deeds.
Initially, Mao liked the opera. But a few years later, as the political winds changed, he smelled a conspiracy—or perhaps he simply needed an excuse to launch a political campaign against those the spirit of Hai Rui represented. Mao came to see the opera as an indictment of his own firing of Peng Dehuai. Mao’s genius had always been his ability to rally public opinion to his side, even before he moved against his political opponents. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, secretly got a young Shanghainese writer named Yao Wenyuan to pen a critique of the opera, in which he condemned the play as a “poisonous weed,” not a flower, and as a plot to overturn the verdict on Peng.
The publication of Yao’s article at the end of 1965 was the opening act of a political movement of unprecedented scale in human history that would engulf the nation. The purpose of the Cultural Revolution, as it was called, was ostensibly to carry on a class struggle to rid China of “old thought, old culture, old tradition and old customs,” and to purge class enemies from within the Party and the government. The movement was marked by a groundswell of millions of ordinary people who responded to Mao’s call to attack and overthrow almost anything or anyone in a position of authority: leaders in government, the judicial system, cultural circles, academic fields, and economic affairs became targets. The movement would plunge the country into a state of anarchy for years to come and by some estimates would result in the deaths of more than a million people, including Liu Shaoqi himself and some of the best talents China ever had.
But all still seemed calm and blissful in the spring of 1966 when I was preparing to finish elementary school.
* * *
It was early summer 1966. All through the broiling summer days, the cicadas continued their unrelenting chorus. The Beijing habit of napping on summer days must have something to do with the heat and the cicadas. The hot, still air and the constant noise of cicadas enervate people and lull them to sleep.
Not me. I spent the afternoons studying. I was 12 years old and about to graduate from elementary school. We had already taken the elementary school graduation exams and were preparing to take the all-important middle school entrance examination. Middle school in China was roughly the same secondary education program as junior high and high school in the United States. I would attend junior middle school until about age 15, followed by senior middle school from age 15 to 18. Thus, getting into a good middle school was critical. If I did not perform well on my entrance exams, I risked ending up in a mediocre program, with no chance of getting into a good college.
In fact, I was determined to score top grades in the two major subjects: mathematics and Chinese language composition. I had more confidence in mathematics than in Chinese. I usually received the highest grade in mathematics, but in composition I had received only 98 percent on the elementary graduating exam, and I was disappointed. (Composition was always too tricky a subject: the teacher might not have liked your style, and you could easily misuse a Chinese character.) But I had to get a double hundred to be accepted into Middle School No. 101, one of the best in Beijing.
I had been too busy studying to notice that some of my classmates were missing. They came back at dinnertime to tell us what had happened to them that day. Gao Jianjing, the Young Pioneers leader of our class, had led a group of our classmates to Beijing City Hall to watch “revolution” in action.
We had heard earlier that in some schools, particularly middle schools and universities, students had rebelled against their teachers and refused to take final exams. This rebellion was spreading in Beijing; but until that day, our school had not been affected.
Having heard that there was a lot of activity at city hall, Gao and some other classmates went there to watch the excitement. They went in the name of revolution, so none of our teachers or principals dared stop them.
City hall was close to my home, but about 15 kilometers (∼10 miles) away from our school. To a group of 12- and 13-year-olds, it was a long distance. Yet they walked all the way to city hall and saw everything.
They saw crowds of people haranguing the mayor and vice mayors. They saw people giving speeches about the necessity of revolution. They saw Ma Lianliang, one of the best-known opera actors, being beaten up by a group of “revolutionaries.” His leg was broken and h
e passed out. His crime was having played a lead role in Wu Han’s opera, The Firing of Hai Rui, now regarded as a “poisonous weed.” He was then labeled a “capitalist-reactionary authority” in the arts. Ma, one of the most accomplished performing artists in China, would die a physically broken man before the end of the year. The revolutionaries shouting slogans, making speeches, and beating people up, Gao and the others told me, were Red Guards. It was the first time I had heard the name.
It was all much more exciting than studying for the final exam. It was even more exciting that the school authorities did not do anything to prevent my classmates from going to city hall. They even had to send a school bus to pick them up and bring them back. Who would dare not to support revolution, especially one led by Young Pioneers?
Over the past few months, we had heard stories about how a girl “rebelled” against her parents because they promised to give her a bicycle as a gift if she did well on the final exam. She said that her parents were trying to motivate her with “materialistic incentives,” which, by definition, were capitalistic. She was praised in the newspaper for upholding revolutionary principles.
In a document my father showed me, I read some remarks made by Chairman Mao excoriating the current educational system. Mao said teachers treated students like enemies and exams were like “surprise attacks.” He said that such a system discouraged creativity. Mao cited examples showing that the most accomplished emperors in Chinese history were usually not well educated, whereas the most educated ones turned out to be disasters or losers. He also said that students should be allowed to whisper to each other, exchange notes, and check their textbooks during exams.