by Weijian Shan
According to the story, in January 1967, a group of provincial governors and Party secretaries gathered in a hotel catering to senior officials in Beijing to attend a “study session,” the real purpose of which was probably to hide themselves from the Red Guards and the Rebels. One day, Mao paid them a surprise visit. The memoir recounted:
Chairman Mao shook hands with those comrades standing in the front. Suddenly he spotted Wang Enmao who stood out in the crowd because of his height. Mao walked over to him to shake his hand and said: “I heard the Rebels of Xinjiang want to knock you down. How is it? Will you be knocked down?”
“Knock-down” was a commonly used revolutionary terminology of the time, meaning to bring down someone from his high position. A “knocked-down” senior official or an academic authority, publicly considered a counterrevolutionary bad person, was deprived of his previous job, disgraced, and subject to constant struggle sessions and humiliation.
Wang didn’t know how to respond to Mao’s enquiries and blurted out, “That depends on the Chairman’s attitude [toward me].”
Chairman Mao smiled and said “I don’t think you can be knocked down.” As he was walking away, he turned his head and added, “Wang Enmao won’t be knocked down.”
But Wang lost his position and did not assume a similar position until 10 years later.
Soon after, we heard of more trouble in Xinjiang Province. In 1967, there was a fight brewing between different Rebel factions in the town of Shihezi, outside the provincial capital, Urumqi. Each faction had captured weapons, including guns. Ever adventurous, He Yuzhou wanted to organize a trip to go there. Shihezi would be a long journey from Beijing. It takes five and half hours to fly there from Beijing today, about the same time as flying from New York to San Francisco. By train back then, it would have taken days. This time, my parents put their foot down and would not let me go because they knew that Shihezi had become a war zone, and they were concerned about my safety. But I was already 13 years old, old enough to make my own decisions, and I was living in a time of rebellion. I insisted on going. I packed a few things and went to the train station on the day of departure to join Yuzhou and the others. I was already aboard the train when my father showed up.
Without a word, as he knew reasoning with me would have been futile and could get him into trouble if he said something politically incorrect within earshot of the Red Guards on the train, he just grabbed my bag and took me home. The revolutionary in me did not have the courage to challenge or knock down my father’s authority in the family.
About a month later, Yuzhou and his friends came back from Xinjiang. They reported seeing armed conflicts between factions of the Rebels, involving guns, even tanks and rockets, which they had looted from the military troops stationed there. (The military was ordered not to fight back when attacked to avoid casualties or to take sides.) One student from Beijing was killed when a rocket pierced the tank he was sitting in and blew it up. Some young people who went to Shihezi were killed. My father may have saved my life.
* * *
Meanwhile on the political front, things were coming to a head. Public criticism of President Liu Shaoqi intensified in 1967. As the verbal and written attacks on Liu intensified in the public, Liu remained holed up in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, formerly an imperial garden in the Forbidden City. Many Rebel organizations descended on Zhongnanhai to demand that he be dragged out. This became known as the “Outing Liu Movement.” Numerous tents and people occupied the sidewalk across the streets from the gates of Zhongnanhai. They stayed there day and night, shouting slogans and making demands through megaphones and loudspeakers.
After returning from the Great Networking, my classmates and I did not have anything to do but go to the Wangfujing shopping street to buy Red Guard newspapers to read, or just wander around the city day after day. I do not remember whose idea it was, but we decided to join the Outing Liu Movement and set up a tent outside Zhongnanhai. We, like others, managed to build a makeshift shelter, out of cardboard cartons. We stayed there whenever we wanted, but mostly at night, because there nobody would tell us to go to bed. We would go home only to have meals. This festival atmosphere lasted for some weeks.
One day in the summer of 1967, I went home for a meal and then took a nap. I did not get much sleep in the tent, so I was exhausted. I asked my mother to wake me up after an hour or two, so I could go back to the tent to join my friends. When I woke up, it was already the next morning. I was quite upset with my mother for not waking me, and I stalked out of our home. I suppose either I was too tired, or she did not really try, as I am sure she didn’t approve of my revolutionary actions.
When I got back to the tent, I saw that Wang Yuanbo was missing. I assumed he had also gone home to sleep. No, that was not the case, my other classmate told me. The night before, a man representing Premier Zhou had come around, asking those in each tent to send a representative to the Great Hall of the People for a meeting with the premier himself. Yuanbo went but had not returned.
When Yuanbo finally came back, he reported that Zhou had spent all night, until early that morning, talking with the representatives of the Rebel groups camped outside Zhongnanhai. Zhou tried hard to persuade them all to leave. Many did not agree and argued with him. But Zhou patiently worked on everyone until they all finally agreed to comply with his request. Maybe it was due to Zhou’s powers of persuasion, or maybe he just exhausted everyone with his stamina. In any case, by the morning, an agreement was reached that all the protesters would pull out. When I reflect upon this event, I still find it incredible that Zhou, in his position of power, would bother to spend so much time patiently persuading a bunch of mindless teenagers to get out of that place.
Liu Shaoqi soon lost his freedom, regardless. In October 1968, the central committee expelled him from the Party. By then more than 70 percent of the members of the Party Central Committee had been purged for various “crimes.” Liu Shaoqi died, in degrading and cruel circumstances, in prison in 1969 in Kaifeng, Henan Province.
For me, as 1966 gave way to 1967, and throughout my first year as a teenager, there was little to do. Our indefinite “school vacation” felt great at first, but by now we were quite bored and restless. Not only were there no schools to attend, but every form of entertainment was shut down. Public parks like Beihai were off limits. Closing down ancient temples and parks was a decision Premier Zhou had made when the Red Guards were roaming the country smashing up or burning down everything of the old, including temples and religious statues. Libraries were closed, and cinemas and theaters were shuttered because every program of theirs was considered bourgeois or worse. Bookstores were closed, too, because nobody could tell anymore which books would be considered offensive or anti-socialist. In Beijing alone, there must have been hundreds of thousands of students my age who were out of school and without a job. Groups of students wandered around the city on foot or on bicycles, looking for trouble.
In 1968, my parents decided to send my sister and me to my mother’s old home village in Shandong Province. We took a train to the port town of Tanggu, near the city of Tianjin, about two hours away from Beijing, where we boarded a passenger vessel. The big passenger boat sailed out of the Haihe River into the sea and then to Yantai, a port city in Shandong. We had third-class tickets, which entitled us to a bunk bed in the crowded bowels of the boat. The journey took several days. It was the first time I’d been on a big ship. I was seasick. I took with me a little duckling I had bought in Beijing in a small basket and tried to keep it alive by feeding it whatever I ate on the boat. Luckily, my duckling survived, and I raised it during my stay in my mother’s village.
The village of Liushengyuan was in the Muping district of Yantai (the former colonial-era treaty port of Chefoo, briefly controlled by the Germans before World War I). My sister was already familiar with it because she was raised there until she was seven. The land was quite hilly, so farmland was all in small plots. We stayed with my mother’s sister an
d her husband. They lived together with my maternal grandmother in a small brick house with two small bedrooms, each on one side of the home, and one common area in the middle for cooking and eating. Half of each bedroom was a kang, a raised platform made of mud bricks on which we slept. A mud-plastered wall circled the house, which had a small yard in front. At one side of the yard was the single-hole outhouse. There was also a backyard with a pigpen. I set my little duckling free in the front yard and fed him vegetables and chopped-up frogs that I caught in the river outside the village.
I worked during the day with the villagers, at their various tasks, now plowing a piece of land, now washing a relatively cheap sort of ginseng they grew there, now pushing a cart to move earth from one place to another, or digging ditches as needed. I also went with my sister into the hills to collect mushrooms after a rain. My aunt and grandma made noodle soup with the mushrooms we collected. The custom was for men to eat first, before women could eat, at every meal. Somehow my sister wasn’t bothered by it, but it felt quite awkward for me to eat before my grandma, aunt, and sister.
The village had been organized into a production brigade, part of the “people’s commune” of Wuning. People worked not for money but points. A strong laborer could get 10 points a day. A woman typically received 5 to 7 points. I forgot how many points I earned, but it was probably 3 to 5, considering my age, 14, and my small build. At harvest time, villagers were allocated grain and other things in accordance with the points they earned for the year.
There was a small shop in the village that sold staples like soy sauce, vinegar, salt, and soap. Many villagers did not have money to buy things. Instead, they bartered, bringing eggs laid by the hens they raised at home to the shop in exchange for food, soap, thread, needles, and the like.
My grandma and aunt cooked us steamed buns of wheat flour and occasionally noodles. Sometimes, my uncle would bring back a slice of meat when he went to the weekly barter market—like a flea market in the United States—a place farmers where gathered to sell some of their produce. It was some 10 kilometers (∼6 miles) away. I knew wheat flour buns and noodles were a treat for us because we were guests. My relatives had a limited supply of wheat flour and instead they more often ate corn flour, which was considered inferior.
It was the first time I had tried my hand in farming, and I worked hard. I soon earned the respect of the men I was working with, although from time to time they teased me for my awkwardness. I enjoyed working with these men and talking with them. I also enjoyed catching grasshoppers in the fields and frogs and tiny fish in the river. There was not much of a river to speak of, and it only filled with water when it rained. Otherwise, it was just a tiny creek, with hardly any water flowing through. Occasionally I saw a snake. The villagers would not let me kill it because they thought killing a snake would bring bad luck.
One day I was digging a ditch with a relative of ours whom I had just gotten to know. He was talking with me about life in the village. Then he said, “Chairman Mao’s leadership is not good.”
I was shocked because criticizing Mao would be considered a crime in Beijing, and it could get someone in deep trouble. Besides, I had no idea why he thought Mao’s leadership was not good. So I asked him why he would say such a thing. He answered, “We work very hard. But we don’t have enough to eat.”
I was speechless. This conversation made a deep impression on me because it was the first time in my life I had heard anyone question Mao. But I also knew that village life was hard, in comparison with our life in Beijing, and when he said there was not enough to eat, he was telling the truth.
* * *
In the autumn of 1968, word came that the schools were reopening. All of us would be assigned to a middle school near our home. My sister and I were both assigned to the Worker-Peasant-Soldier Middle School. The name of the school was brand new. In fact, it previously had been No. 13 Girls Middle School, where I had watched a group of teenage girls beat their principal to death two years earlier. I did not like the thought of going back there; I also did not like the idea of being assigned to a girls’ school, even though it was co-ed now. But there was no choice, and all my classmates living in our neighborhood were assigned there as well, so at least I would have company.
There were no real classes at the Worker-Peasant-Soldier Middle School. There were no textbooks, and the few teachers around were too scared to teach anything. This being the case, I did not bother going to class very often, and only visited occasionally. They did try to teach us some English, although it was mostly repeating revolutionary slogans and the sayings of Chairman Mao. I remember one day in class the teacher wrote a sentence in English on the blackboard and asked us to repeat after her. The sentence was “Long live Chairman Mao.” That was the first English sentence I ever learned. We repeated the sentence several times, and that was it.
That evening, two teachers came to our home after dinner. They sat down and began to interrogate me about what I had done at school that day. It turned out that after we had left school someone noticed some Chinese characters written in chalk on the blackboard. The pronunciation of the characters sounded like “Long live Chairman Mao.” But in Chinese it read as “broken clothes Tiananmen cat,” which made no sense at all, except that “cat” was pronounced the same way as “Mao.” They thought “Tiananmen Cat” was a deliberate insult to Mao and they wanted to find the culprit. They knew my classmates and I had been the last to leave the classroom, so they suspected me of being one of the offenders.
I had not noticed anyone writing on the blackboard at all, so the teachers’ effort to coerce a confession out of me failed. Eventually they found the perpetrator, who was indeed a close friend of mine and who had left school with me that day. His gaffe was of course unintentional– he was simply scribbling on the board to mimic the English pronunciation of what he had learned during the day. But in those days, such a mistake could have been considered a serious crime. Anyone caught saying anything critical or not respectful of Mao would land in deep trouble. Fortunately, the teachers of our school chose to believe my friend, but only after he repeatedly wrote self-criticisms was he let off the hook.
* * *
Since there was not much schooling going on, we were sent to help build Beijing’s first subway line. It was being constructed where the old city walls and the moats were on the north side of the city. The ancient walls were torn down and a deep trench was dug, which was then covered over to make the subway tunnel. (Underground drilling is more common in today’s construction.) We thought we were there to help, but the construction workers considered us a nuisance. They probably could not refuse to take us. I was fortunate to be able to add the building of a subway to my résumé, to no apparent use ever again in my life.
I worked with the construction workers to carry rails to their right positions. Today such work is done by heavy machinery. But in those days, rails had to be carried and moved about by hand. Otherwise, there really was not much a bunch of 15- and 16-year-olds could do in the tunnel. The workers had to find work for us. They came up with an ingenuous idea. They gave each of us a steel saw blade and told us to start cutting up portions of rail. Usually, a steel saw was made from a blade mounted on a bow-shaped frame. But we were only given the blade, not the bow. It was a narrow strip of steel with teeth on one side. I could only hold it with two or three of my fingers and had no way to exert any pressure on what I was cutting. It would have taken a year at least to saw through a rail. That tool kept us busy for the remainder of our stay, but we did not make much of a dent in even one single rail.
We were not paid anything to do the work, so nobody cared how long we worked or if we were doing anything productive. I quite enjoyed just being there and seeing how the subway was built. We spent a long time in the subway, although I doubt if we made any real contribution.
* * *
A few months after his nighttime audience with Zhou Enlai, Wang Yuanbo came to my house with another surprise: He brought Z
heng Lian, the self-styled Red Guard commander in chief and possible lunatic who had split with us partway through our Great Networking trip because he wanted to get to Beijing more quickly. I thought he had long ago gone home to Fuzhou. He looked haggard and dirty. I was sure he was wearing the same clothes he had on the last time I had seen him, about two years earlier, but they were tattered and soiled. He said he had been in Beijing for the past two years visiting the petition office of the central government almost every day. But he had not received the justice he was seeking. Now he had run out of money, so he came to ask for help. I gave him the little money and some grain coupons I had, as did Yuanbo. That was the last I saw him. I have no idea what eventually happened to him, as none of us heard anything about him again.
* * *
Elementary school never formally ended after my 1966 exams. We just kept going back to the campus whenever we wanted to hang around with friends. The school had become our playground. That was where we found ourselves on a summer day in 1967.
I was the first one to notice the man in the military uniform. Through the window of the gatekeeper’s station where my friends and I were hanging around, I watched as he stepped out of a jeep parked in front of the school gate and walked toward us.
The uniformed man, who obviously was a military officer, walked into the gatekeeper’s station and politely asked about the whereabouts of Li Lun, our principal. The gatekeeper told him to go to the school’s main building where the principal’s office was located, and he opened the gate to let in the officer’s vehicle.
Sensing trouble and excitement, all of us children ran after the jeep, following it to the main building about a hundred yards away. This time, two officers got out of the vehicle and proceeded into the building, where they climbed the stairs to the second floor. They walked briskly, with a group of us following them. I thought they would shoo us away lest we interfere in their official business, but they were in a hurry and ignored us. We got bolder and ran ahead of them to lead them to the principal’s office.