by Weijian Shan
The next day I woke to yelling outside. It was the voices of night soil collectors who were pulling carts with tanks into which people emptied their chamber pots. I had never seen anything like this in Beijing, which at least had flush toilets.
I didn’t go out with the group that day because I still couldn’t walk. It took two or three days for the swelling in my feet to finally subside. It felt great to walk normally again. And then it was time to leave Shanghai.
Our first stop after Shanghai was in Shang-rao, a small city about 500 kilometers (∼300 miles) to the southeast. We visited an infamous Nationalist concentration camp there, where the captured Communist fighters had been imprisoned and tortured.
Our next destination was Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. Yuzhou wanted to take us to Xiamen, a coastal city across from Taiwan. But we were not permitted to travel there because it was on the front line of hostilities; the Communists and Nationalists were still technically at war, and there was artillery shelling every other day.
Fuzhou was a much quieter city, and we stayed on the campus of Fuzhou University, which was almost deserted, with just a few students hanging around. We noticed that numerous wall posters were splattered everywhere, denouncing this or that person from the administrative or academic authorities. We wandered around the campus, reading the posters. We noticed that one organization was impressively prolific. Poster upon poster bore the signature of the United Rebellion Headquarters of Red Guards. This had to be the largest Red Guard organization in the university, we thought, and we decided to pay it a visit.
We traced the organization to a classroom. We went in and saw a man standing with his back to the door, brush in hand, writing with furious speed. Hearing us enter, the man turned around and greeted us. We asked him if we were at the United Rebellion Headquarters. He answered in the affirmative and invited us to sit down. He introduced himself as Zheng Lian.
Yuzhou said: “We are from Beijing. We are here to do the Great Networking. We read the wall posters of your organization and think there is a lot we could learn from you. Can we meet with the commander-in-chief of the United Rebellion Headquarters?”
“That’s me,” he said.
“Ah. How many people are under your command?”
“Oh, just myself,” Zheng Lian replied.
We were surprised but also impressed, as Zheng Lian single-handedly had covered nearly the entire campus with his essays in big-character posters. What a singular revolutionary force.
Zheng Lian began telling us his grievances against the university authorities, most of which predated the Cultural Revolution. As a student, he said, administrative leaders persecuted him because he had criticized them for pursuing a capitalist path in education. To silence and punish him, the authorities refused to let him graduate and locked him in a mental hospital, where Zheng Lian fought back by going on a hunger strike. In response, the hospital staff force-fed him. Thanks to Chairman Mao, he said, he was freed at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Now he was going after the authorities in full force, fighting with his writing brush to expose the true counterrevolutionary color of the leadership of the university and the province.
That he was persecuted in such a cruel manner for his dissent sounded outrageous to us, and we offered him our sympathy. Yuzhou decided we should go to the mental hospital to investigate our new comrade’s mistreatment. The next day, some of our team members and Zheng Lian went there, and came back saying that the nurses and Zheng Lian’s doctor corroborated his story. Indeed, he had been a patient, and they did force-feed him. Yuzhou asked how they diagnosed him as mentally ill. The doctor told him Zheng Lian was delusional because on a group outing he was offered a bowl of water by a girl on the roadside, and he later insisted that the girl was in love with him. Then Yuzhou asked the doctor why Zheng Lian was released. The doctor said that he was considered cured because he admitted that he had a mental problem. In the doctor’s view, if a mental patient admitted he was a nut case, he had already recovered, because mental patients never admitted they were sick.
* * *
We left Fuzhou by bus for Changting in Fujian Province. This area had been one of the earliest revolutionary bases of the Red Army, between 1929 and 1934. Yuzhou plotted a mini–Long March for our group. We would hike nearly 50 kilometers (∼30 miles) from Gucheng in Fujian’s Changting district, to Ruijin in neighboring Jiangxi Province. Our walk would take us through the Wuyi Mountains, retracing the footsteps of the Red Army. Ruijin was the capital of the short-lived Chinese Soviet Republic, also known as the Jiangxi Soviet. It was from here that Mao and his Red Army began the Long March to avoid annihilation by the Nationalist troops in 1934.
We set out late one afternoon when it was no longer hot. Since the trek was expected to be tough, Hou Erman and another girl took a bus and said they would meet us at the destination. The mountain road was reasonably good and the slope was quite gentle. There were trees on both sides of the road and covering the entire mountain. But the road was quite wide and open, so I did not feel like walking in the woods. From time to time, we encountered local farmers walking in the opposite direction carrying heavy loads on a big pole slung across their shoulders. We walked and walked until night fell and we did not see any other trekkers on the road. Then it became a little scary because we heard the howls of wild animals, but we could not see anything in the gathering darkness. Soon it was completely dark, and we could only pick our way forward in the moonlight. Just then, we heard some people shouting from behind us.
“Stop! Wait!” came the female voices.
We all stopped in our tracks, stiffened up, and turned around.
We could see only a few shadows of human figures running toward us. As they ran, they kept yelling, “Wait! Wait!”
They were four or five women, each with a pole on her shoulder. When they caught up with us, they told us in halting voices, as they were out of breath, that there were tigers in the mountains.
“Can we walk together with you?” they asked, clearly afraid.
Knowing about the tigers made us frightened and nervous, too, even though I doubted they were lurking in the woods around a road so close to people. As we walked together, I did not know if our company made them more comfortable or their company did us. But after a while, we reached their village on the side of the road. They thanked us and disappeared into the darkness.
Zheng Lian traveled with us. He told us he thought it was hopeless to win his case in Fujian Province. He was determined to go to Beijing and petition the central government personally. As our little group approached the border dividing Fujian and Jiangxi Provinces, Zheng Lian grew increasingly tense and nervous. Finally, he walked close to me and grabbed my arm.
“I fear I’ll be assassinated,” he whispered into my ear.
“The Fujian government would never let me go to Beijing to petition against them. I think they will try to kill me before we reach the provincial border.”
He was so deadly serious that I felt scared. Then he said, as he handed me his carrying bag, “These are my petition papers with important evidence that will expose the crimes of the Party organizations in Fuzhou University and Fujian Province. I want you to carry them. If I am assassinated, I ask you to take them to Beijing and deliver them to Chairman Mao personally. I want you to swear that you will do this for me.”
No one in my young life had ever taken me so seriously or entrusted me with anything so important. I was touched by his trust and impressed by the gravity of the situation. I felt a great sense of revolutionary responsibility. I did not so much as consider my own safety. I think he chose me because I was the youngest, shortest, and smallest in our group, so his assassins might overlook me. I accepted his bag, slung its straps across my shoulders, and held it tightly with both my arms. Feeling the weight of the bag, and my duty, I solemnly promised that I would carry it to Beijing and personally hand it to Chairman Mao.
Satisfied, he walked away and kept a distance from me.
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Soon we reached the provincial border. Along one side of the road was a wall surrounding a compound of houses that straddled the border. On the Fujian side, the wall was dark, but on the side of Jiangxi, a neighboring province, it was painted a bright white. The difference in color clearly marked the border between the two provinces.
We walked across that border line without being ambushed. After we crossed it, Zheng Lian came over to me. He said now he was out of danger, so I could give the bag back to him. I did, but I wondered why the bad guys would not simply follow him all the way, because after all, they could go where we could. It was then that I began to question his ability to reason and suspect maybe he really was a delusional lunatic as the doctors in the mental hospital diagnosed. In any case, my heroic willingness to help him in a situation of life and death seemed to be in vain.
By now, we were hungry. We walked into another small village by the roadside. We knocked on the door of a house and a man answered. We told him we wanted to find something to eat. He prepared a meal for us, and we left him some money for the food. We rarely had occasion to spend the money we carried with us, because everywhere we went, whether it was a school or a government reception station, lodging and food were provided for free. It was only in places like this, at private homes in the middle of nowhere, that we had a chance to spend some money.
This was the longest walk I had ever done. I became more and more tired as we walked. My legs felt like lead and every step was difficult. I sat down to rest and immediately fell asleep. My companions woke me up and pushed me to move forward.
Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, we reached Ruijin. There was a local government reception station where I fell asleep immediately after lying down on the straw-covered floor in a small room. The next morning, I was awakened by the laughter of children.
“You come to Ruijin to visit and to learn. What visit and learn? You sleep!”
Then they would laugh and repeat the taunt again and again. I suppose they did not see outside visitors often and, because of my size, I was an easy target for their jeering.
Ruijin was nestled in the middle of rice paddies surrounded by mountains. It felt more like a big village than a small town. There were still a few buildings from the days of the Jiangxi Soviet of the 1930s, including Mao’s residence and Party meeting places.
Of particular interest to us was a nearby well that Mao had supposedly dug himself. There was a story in our elementary school textbook about it. According to the story, there was a village by the name of Shazhouba outside Ruijin. One day, Mao saw some farmers from Shazhouba carrying buckets of murky water. It turned out that the only source of water for everyone in the village was the village pond, where people also washed their clothes. So Mao had a well dug there to supply them with clean drinking water. There was a stone tablet at the head of the well erected by the villagers, and it read: “When drinking water do not forget the well digger; always miss Chairman Mao.” We asked around and found the well with the stone tablet. We drank the water from the well.
The water was supposed to be sweet, but I could not taste any sweetness at all. Nobody, however, would say a word about it not being sweet, which would be disrespectful to Mao. We took a picture of ourselves standing on both sides of the inscribed stone tablet to memorialize this great moment of having visited the sacred well and drunk its water.
I was quite impressed by an octagonal auditorium the Red Army built in the village to hold big meetings. The building’s shape echoed the shape of the caps worn by the Red Army soldiers. Edgar Snow’s picture of Mao in an octagonal cap became the cover photo of his book Red Star over China. But the shape of the building was not just symbolic. Each side of the octagon had a big door. The local people explained there had been aerial bombings from time to time by Nationalist forces. The doors on all sides of the auditorium facilitated evacuation when there was an air raid. I thought the design was quite clever.
* * *
After Ruijin, we took a bus to Ganzhou, a major city in Jiangxi Province. The only impression I had of Ganzhou was its spices. It seemed all the food was spicy there. Even breakfast was spicy. I asked people if there was anything not spicy and I was told no. I could not eat such spicy food, so I ate only rice at every meal.
From Ganzhou, we went by bus to Jinggang Mountain, in Jiangxi Province, where Mao had established his first base after leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. It was there that Mao’s men joined forces with the men led by Zhu De to found the Red Army. Zhu became the chief commander and Mao the political commissar.
For Red Guards and those of us on the Great Networking, a visit to Jinggang Mountain was like a pilgrimage. We found it quite crowded there, and the local government had organized the place to accommodate a steady stream of visitors. There was a large dining hall where everyone ate. The menu was the same as what the Red Army supposedly ate about four decades earlier. There was a popular Red Army song that described the food:
Red rice, pumpkin soup,
Autumn eggplant, taste so good,
Every meal eaten up we could.
We were served red rice and pumpkin soup for every meal to re-create the experience of Red Army soldiers. I found the rice coarse and the pumpkin soup somewhat tasteless, although I didn’t dare to say that lest my friends laughed at me for not being as tough as a Red Army soldier.
* * *
The next day, we hiked to Huangyangjie, which was where the Red Army once defeated Nationalist troops. Our lodging place was about 800 meters (∼2,600 feet) above sea level. Huangyangjie, at the top of the mountain, lies at about 1,300 meters (∼4,300 feet) above sea level. There was a narrow, crowded trail leading there. I did not feel it was particularly difficult, although I saw many people resting along the trail’s edge, huffing and puffing. On the mountaintop was a big stone monument with an inscription that read “the monument for the victory in the battle to defend Huangyangjie.” The inscription was the calligraphy of Zhu De, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army. Mao wrote a poem in 1928 to commemorate the battle:
Below the hills fly our flags and banners,
Above the hilltops sound our bugles and drums.
Enemies encircle us thousands strong,
Steadfastly we stand our ground.
Already our defense is iron-clad,
Now our wills unite like a fortress.
From Huangyangjie roars the thunder of guns,
Word comes the enemy has fled into the night.
We looked around to see where the enemy might have attacked, but there was nothing to be seen. All around us were green mountains covered by trees and bamboo forests. The bamboo there was tall and thick. Local people used the bamboo for shoulder poles, water bottles, and all kinds of furniture. Each one of us was given a machete to cut a stalk of bamboo for our own use. I took my machete and went into the bamboo forest with my friends. I selected a nice, thick stalk, about as big around as the diameter of the mouth of a large rice bowl, and took a swing. I thought it would be quite easy to cut since bamboo trees were hollow. But I hacked and hacked without seeming to make much progress; the tough, fibrous outer wall of the trunk was nearly two centimeters thick. I worked with my machete for hours, until it started to get dark. The bamboo was so tall, and the forest so thick, that little sunlight shone through. Most people had already left. I had heard that there were tigers in this area, too, and was afraid that I would lose my way when night fell, so I stopped hacking and left in a hurry.
* * *
I think that in the mind of our friend Yuzhou, who had been the inspiration for the journey, the purpose of our trip was simply to see the country and have an adventure. There was no plan to spread any revolutionary ideas. Yuzhou and two of his older friends planned the entire trip. Because the government sanctioned the Great Networking, there was no need to book train or bus tickets in advance. You just showed up at the scheduled time and boarded the train. All the trains were overcrowded but we could always squeeze in. It d
id not matter that none of the trains were on time, as chaos was characteristic of the time and was normal, and we were not in a hurry anyhow.
* * *
We finished our Great Networking by the end of October 1966 and returned to Beijing after almost a month on the road. The situation there was as chaotic as when we had left, and the city was still filled with Red Guards from all over China. One day, I got wind of a big “struggle session” going on in the auditorium of the compound of our home. I went to check it out. There in front of a big crowd was Wang Enmao, who until then had been the Party Secretary of Xinjiang Province, in China’s far west. I saw him on the stage, with his head bowed low, being held by two people on either side of him. One speaker after another jumped onto the stage to harangue and denounce him for his crimes.
“Down with the capitalist roader Wang Enmao!” one man shouted on the stage.
“Down with Wang Enmao,” the crowd echoed in a roar.
“Long live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution! Long live Chairman Mao!”
The shouting of the slogans was so loud that the building seemed to shake.
Throughout, Wang did not utter a word, refusing to speak when his tormentors challenged him with this question or that. This old man was really tough, I thought.
Wang, 54 years old in 1966, was a veteran Red Army soldier who participated in the Red Army’s Long March. At the founding of the PRC, he was made a lieutenant general. I later read in a memoir that in the end, Mao protected him, which spared him the worst of the Red Guards’ excesses.