by Weijian Shan
The tunnel was part of the airflow system. Air flowed through the tunnel into the kiln, and the heated air inside exited by flowing up and out through the chimney. To make a good batch, once the fire started, it could not stop until the bricks were fully baked. Half-baked bricks were useless. Therefore, we had to take turns feeding coal into the fire continuously for days around the clock.
Feeding the fire was a tough and dirty job. The fire had to be strong enough to bake all the bricks in the kiln to a red-hot color like molten iron. Inside the tunnel it was hellishly hot. The fire, right in front of our faces, belched choking black smoke, which filled the tunnel. From time to time we had to lean into the inferno, using an iron bar to loosen the burning coal and remove the ash slabs to allow the fire to burn better.
I learned to keep my body low, bending beneath the smoke that floated up. The closer to the ground I stayed, the less smoke I inhaled. From time to time, though, I had to get out of the tunnel to gulp for fresh air. We worked like this for hours at a time each shift. Our bodies were covered with coal dust and smoke. Each work shift was hell. The conditions in the tunnel varied with the weather. When the sky was clear and there was wind, the fire burned well and there was little smoke in the tunnel because the barometric pressure was high and airflow was good. But when it was overcast and still, when the barometric pressure was low, it became almost unbearable; the fire could not burn well and the tunnel would be filled with suffocating smoke. It was the worst if it rained, when I felt as if the tunnel itself became a chimney with the hot, dirty, choking smoke flowing right into my face, nostrils, and lungs. If you think smoking is bad, try inhaling coal smoke and you will consider tobacco smoke a form of clean air.
The night shift was particularly tough, as I had to fight drowsiness as well as heat and smoke. There was a wooden bench next to the fire’s mouth, where we could sit during the intervals between feeding coal. Sometimes, when I got too tired, I would lie on it for a few minutes. Fortunately, two people worked each shift, so we could take turns running out of the tunnel to gasp for air. When the night sky was clear, I looked up to see it filled with stars. They shone brightly because all around us was complete darkness. There was no artificial light in the Gobi at night. Usually a person with an exhausted body was oblivious to beauty, as I knew from experience. But it was on nights like this I felt that I saw breathtaking wonders few others had the privilege of seeing, like the burning inferno under my feet and the stars above my head.
A few days after firing the kiln, I went up to the top of kiln to look down into it through the observation holes. It was a beautiful sight, because the bricks were radiating bright red, like cubes of molten iron stacked into intricate patterns.
The kiln master came back from time to time to check the color of the bricks in the inferno. He told us to stop the fire when he determined the bricks had been baked. We had to wait for a few days for the kiln to cool down before the bricks could be removed and we could learn how well we had done. Completely exhausted after four or five days of firing the kiln, now we could finally take a break. It felt like I had just escaped from hell.
We were amazed our first kiln of bricks was successful. The bricks came out the way they were supposed to. We unloaded the kiln while the bricks were still warm, but no longer hot. Again, two platoons of people joined in the work of taking the bricks out of the kiln. The bricks were loaded onto carts of all types, drawn by horses, donkeys, and cattle. We also used wheelbarrows to move the bricks back to our barracks.
In about two months, we fired the kiln four times and made about 120,000 bricks, not counting breakage. That was enough for our needs for the year, probably with some to spare and ship to other companies.
Now that we had bricks, we began building houses. There was no need for a design or blueprint, as the houses there were identical and simple. Each row had three doors. Inside each door, there were two rooms, one inside and one outside, connected by an opening without a door. All the houses in this part of China were situated in such a way that their doors and windows faced south, away from the winter winds from the north. Each of the south-facing rooms had a window as well.
A women’s platoon was assigned to help us. Their job was to help carry bricks and other supplies. Our job was to lay the bricks and build.
The first step was to mark out the shape of a house on the ground where walls would be. Then we dug into the earth to turn the marks into rather deep ditches. We laid the foundation by putting layers of stone or bricks in the bottom of the ditch. Once the wall rose above the ground, we put either baked or unbaked bricks on the wall, layer after layer. Our own dorms were made of unbaked bricks, but the company office and kitchen were made of baked red bricks.
We used some tools to ensure quality. A level spindle was a must to make sure that the foundation was built on a precisely level ground. We also used the spindle to make sure that each layer of bricks on the wall was exactly level. We also used a plumb line, a string with a small weight attached at the end, that would ensure it dropped in a perfect vertical.
After the walls on all sides reached a certain height, those on two ends continued to go up in a triangular shape, converging to a point at the top. A large wood beam would be placed on the top of the walls facing each other to support the roof. We had to wait for weeks for the wood to arrive, as it had to be shipped in. We also needed wood to make doors and windows. Huang Yuliang, a boy from Zhejiang Province in the south, was the company’s carpenter. I think his father was a carpenter, too; he was quite skilled. I tried to learn to be a carpenter myself, but I never could do it well. Meanwhile, we spread and covered the walls inside the house with mud to cover all the cracks and holes and make them smooth. Before it was too cold, we completed our task of building new housing for our company.
I then worked as an electrician, wiring each of the rooms of the new house. What I learned about building radios in elementary school turned out to be more than enough to handle the job, which did not require much more than connecting some electric wires to a bare bulb. I liked being a mason and an electrician. It was gratifying to see some tangible results of our labor in the houses we had built, much better than wasting it all in the fields where crops did not grow.
Chapter 14
Petition to Mao
Li Qinglin was an elementary school teacher in suburban Putian, in Fujian Province. On May 6, 1973, the postman delivered a letter to him, in a large envelope on which was printed in red the name of the sender: “The Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.”
Li’s heart missed a beat. He knew immediately that this was a response to a letter he had written to Chairman Mao the previous December. When he opened it, he could not believe his eyes. Mao himself had written the letter.
Mao’s letter read: “Comrade Li Qinglin, 300 yuan is sent to help you put food on the table. Similar things are too many in the country. Please allow [us] to solve them in a coordinated way.”
The letter was dated April 25, 1973. On May 10, Li received 300 yuan from Mao.
It was of course extraordinary for an elementary school teacher in a small town to receive a personal letter from Mao. Li had written to complain about the plight he and his family were in. His son had been forced to volunteer to become a farmer in a poor province. The place was so destitute that his son could hardly make a living and had to ask his father for help. Li and his wife were already living hand-to-mouth, and had nothing to spare. In addition, his younger son was about to finish junior high and was faced with the same prospect as his brother. In desperation, Li decided to write a letter to Mao. He had never expected Mao to personally write him back.
Mao’s letter was soon published in newspapers and touched off a wave of official examination of the problems associated with the “going up to the mountain and down to the countryside” movement. These problems included everything from unnecessary hardships to negligence to the abuse of the young students at the hands of government officials. Looking bac
k, many among the educated youth are still grateful that Li Qinglin had sent his letter; their lives were somewhat improved after the publication of Mao’s response.
Li himself became an instant star. He was made a member of the People’s Congress. But since he was inexperienced in politics, he became something of a pawn of the radicals in the top leadership; they spurred him to heap accusations against their political opponents for the problems his letter had exposed.
Li’s luck did not last. Soon after Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the most powerful faction of the Communist Party during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, Li himself was jailed. In 1978, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for “counterrevolutionary crimes” and was sent to a labor camp to serve his sentence. He was paroled in 1994, after 17 years. He lived off government welfare and the money occasionally sent to him by anonymous former educated youth, who remembered the impact of his letter. He died destitute in 2004 at age 73. His children erected a tombstone on which is inscribed the full text of Mao’s letter to him.
* * *
“Oh, that is more than any patience can endure! God, Who sittest on the brazen heavens enthroned, and smilest with bloody lips, looking down upon agony and death, is it not enough? Is it not enough, without this mockery of praise and blessing? Body of Christ, Thou that wast broken for the salvation of men; blood of Christ, Thou that wast shed for the remission of sins; is it not enough?”
Those were the words that went through the mind of Padre Montanelli, a character in the novel The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich, after having lost his son. At the time, I was so mesmerized by the book that I could not put it down, and I read through it in one go, overnight. The book had long been translated into Chinese and was banned, like almost all other books. But I somehow came to be in temporary possession of a copy. Even though the story was set in the 1840s in Italy, I felt the hardship and pain experienced by its main character, Arthur Burton—whose alias was The Gadfly—and his mental struggle; it somewhat resembled the anguish we were experiencing. Burton renounced his religion, having become completely disillusioned with it, but he could not let go of his love for the padre, who turned out to be his biological father. He tried in vain to persuade the padre to abandon God to be with him. But the padre clung to his faith, in effect sacrificing his son. Now the padre was tormented by his loss: was his sacrifice not enough?
Before he and Arthur parted company for eternity, Padre Montanelli prayed to God for a divine intervention, only to be mocked by Arthur in his stuttering voice:
“C-c-call him louder; perchance he s-s-sleepeth.”
The story touched me deeply and I found myself identifying, even to this day, with The Gadfly’s cynicism about authorities of any kind. Were our sacrifices not enough? What would be our salvation? Who would answer our call?
After having been told so many lies and so much nonsense by those above us, most of us had lost all confidence in authorities. We did not believe in anything anymore. If I learned anything in the Gobi, it is to be always skeptical of authorities of any kind, especially the self-proclaimed ones. But at that time many of us still believed in Mao and Premier Zhou. We thought they must have been blindsided by what was going on in the system. If only they could hear us, they would have intervened. If only they had known the truth . . .
The truth was ugly.
The Army Construction Corps did not help in any way to develop or transform the impoverished countryside for the better. In fact, we only made things much worse. By my calculation, we were consuming three or four times the amount of food we produced every year. Yet we were made to continue to toil on the land throughout the year and to waste all the resources we put into it. We were stuck, in a hopeless situation, led by officers who did not want to be there. They did not care about how much we produced. Their only job seemed to be to drive us to work hard—for the purpose of keeping us occupied. Yet the harder we worked, the more resources we wasted. It made no sense. But nobody, to my knowledge, was questioning this whole enterprise.
There was no morale to speak of. Everyone hated the place and wanted to leave, if only it were possible. Life could not be worse. After a day of hard, fruitless work, the only entertainment was to lie in bed, chatting about the cities we came from, about food, and about girls. Love was taboo, so boys could only talk.
Without the freedom to go home or to get out of this place for anything better, it felt our lives were not so different from those who were sent into exile in Siberia as described in Russian novels.
Yet we were told we should feel fortunate because “three-quarters of the world population still lived under oppression and exploitation.” We should be happy with our lives knowing that people in the capitalist societies led a miserable life. None of us believed that anymore.
My views of this were tempered by listening to broadcasts of programs of the Voice of America and the BBC we picked up on shortwave radio, and from reading whatever I could find, including Reference News, an official newspaper, which our company regularly received, although always a few weeks out of date. Reference News was a collection of clippings from the foreign press, including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters. For some reason, the Christian Science Monitor, a US publication, was frequently referred to, so the name, which in Chinese sounded odd to me, stuck in my head. From this newspaper, I felt somewhat up to date with goings-on in the world. A fool would know our own living standard was barely at subsistence level and could hardly be worse. Yes, there were a lot of people living in poverty in the world in what Mao called Third World or developing countries. But the living standard in the developed countries, all of which were capitalist societies, was without a doubt better—although at the time, I could not comprehend how much better. Of course, they had a long history of industrialization and China was only building itself from a low base. But we were certainly not contributing to it and, if anything, we were doing our share of dragging it down. Looking around, it seemed that the entire Construction Army Corps was a gigantic waste of labor and resources.
We were meant to learn from the poor peasants to help transform our world outlook. How was that working? In truth, the peasants hated and feared us, for good reason. We competed with them for water and land, and we outnumbered them by far. The Army Corps sealed off a large swath of Lake Wuliangsu from the locals who had lived off its bounty for many years before our arrival. If a local were caught “stealing” fish and reeds from what was now “state property,” he would face stiff fines. There had been no need for the locals to venture far from where their villages were to catch plenty of fish in the lake before our arrival. But the Construction Army Corps so overfished that the lake was producing fewer and fewer fish for a much larger population. No wonder: we lived so close to the lake, and yet it was extremely rare for us to have fish to eat.
Whenever a fight broke out between Army Corps soldiers and the local peasants, it was almost always the locals who got beaten up. So many among us had nothing to lose because our lives seemed so meaningless anyhow, that some of us did not think twice about resorting to violence.
The Construction Army Corps gained a bad reputation as a bunch of unruly guys prone to violence; I heard stories that some peasant mothers frightened their kids to bed with “The Army Corps soldiers have come!” The kids would stop crying and hide in their beds right away. I didn’t know if the stories were true, but it was certainly reflective of how the locals viewed us, like a bunch of bandits.
There was savagery on both sides. When a lone Army Corps soldier, well known for his fights with the locals, was caught by a group of peasants, they cut off one of his ears. The Army Corps soldiers retaliated by catching a peasant and slicing off both of his.
Once, I heard, a local peasant was caught by some of our soldiers near the regiment headquarters. He was locked up in a small hut guarded by two Army Corps soldiers. Bored with their job, the two of them decided to have some fun by playing tricks to tease the poor peasan
t. They stood near the window of the hut within earshot of their prisoner.
One said to the other: “It is so troublesome to keep watching this bad guy. I want to finish him off.”
The other said: “Great idea. I still have a bullet in my rifle.”
Then they opened the door and marched inside with their rifles. The peasant stared nervously at the muzzles of their guns. One of them stepped forward and declared, mimicking the heroes in revolutionary model plays:
“You are a counterrevolutionary. On behalf of the Party and the people, I hereby sentence you to immediate execution!”
Then he aimed and pulled the trigger. Upon the sound of explosion, the poor peasant collapsed to the floor. But it was a dummy bullet. It was just a cruel joke.
The two mischief-makers laughed their heads off. And the poor peasant could only grit his teeth.
How could we expect to build a good relationship with the peasants? How could we possibly learn anything from them? The whole idea seemed like a joke, and a very cruel one at that.
Since we lived not much better than animals, some of us started to act like them. Many people became hot tempered, and gang fights were a common occurrence. Much blood was shed as we fought among ourselves. Some bullies were held in awe and fear, while the weak were bullied.
I was considered a nerd and lightweight, but even I got into physical fights a couple of times when I was attacked for no reason; I still bear a scar on my head, which had to be stitched up after being smashed by a heavy ceramic bowl full of hot noodles thrown with full force at my face. (Yes, although you should have seen how the other guy looked.) At another time, I narrowly escaped with my life when a friend and I were chased by a group of ruffians from Company No. 10 wielding shovels just because we had exchanged a few words with a young woman, which, I guessed, might have provoked the jealousy of some boy there. They stopped us right outside their barracks as we were leaving. A tough-looking guy came right to me without a word and swung his fist at my head. Only quick reflexes allowed me to fend it off with my left arm and, with my right fist, I punched him hard in the stomach before yelling to my friend, “Run!” I took off like a rabbit. My friend did not react as fast and he received a few blows before he could get away. There was no better strategy than running as we were so outnumbered and outgunned. I had never run so fast in my life. We were spared the worst. I had to calm down and hold back my friends at our own company who had picked up shovels and other weapons of destruction ready to seek revenge when they heard of our narrow escape. Based on my personal experiences, I can understand how gang violence can easily escalate.