by Weijian Shan
In deteriorating health, Zhou Enlai convinced Mao to bring Deng back to work. In January 1975, at the age of 70, Deng was made vice chairman of the Party, chief of staff of the military, and vice premier, effectively giving him the power to run the country.
In the United States, Richard Nixon resigned as president in August 1974 rather than face impeachment proceedings in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Before his resignation, Nixon had appointed Gerald Ford to be vice president, to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in 1973 for legal troubles of his own. Gerald Ford was sworn in on August 9 following Nixon’s resignation and became the only US president never to have run in an election for national office.
* * *
I arrived back home in Beijing in late September 1975, six years after I had left for the Gobi. It had been an eventful six years for the five members of our family.
My mother, who had been sent to a farm in the northeast for some years, had been allowed to return to her job in Beijing by the time I returned. My father had been away in the African country of Somalia since 1972.
My sister, Weimin, had returned to Beijing a year earlier, after having spent five years in northeast China working on a farm. She was studying computer science at Beijing Industrial University.
My younger brother, Weizhong, was in one sense the luckiest of my siblings, as he was not sent to the countryside. But he was unlucky in other respects.
After graduating from elementary school, my brother was accepted into a vocational school to study chemistry, which he attended between 1974 and 1976. In the first six months, his class was sent to the countryside. There, he lost half of one finger in a wheat threshing machine. Later, working in a chemical factory, he was overcome by a poisonous gas leak. (Known as Zyklon B, the same gas used in the Nazis’ gas chambers, it was used as a softener for plastics.) Fortunately, he was rescued in time. He later went to Beijing University to study biology after the formal examination system was restored in 1977.
My father, meanwhile, from around 1966, had been under investigation at his job in the customs administration. During the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, his work unit could not authenticate his Party membership. Faking membership was a crime, since that was how Nationalist spies were known to infiltrate the Party.
He never told me what the investigation involved, but I knew he had to endlessly recount his personal history in every detail. Proving the authenticity of his Party membership was next to impossible, because there were no membership cards when the Communist Party was outlawed under the Nationalist government. It just required two members to sponsor a new member and bear witness to his membership.
Unfortunately, one of his two sponsors was long dead. The other one was living in Shandong. But during the Cultural Revolution, many of the members whom he had brought into the Party were denounced as counterrevolutionaries. He was so scared of being implicated in a case like this that he simply denied knowing or having introduced my father into the Party. With one of his sponsors being dead, and another refusing to stand up for him, my father was in jeopardy.
Fortunately, according to my mother, the members of the Rebel group in the customs administration were not young students, but responsible adults. They could not find any other stains in my father’s history, as he came from a suitably poor family, and there was nothing else connecting him to anything suspicious. The Rebels went to Shandong repeatedly to visit with my father’s introductory sponsor, now an elderly man, assuring him that my father had no problems other than not being able to prove his Party membership. Finally, the old man relented and admitted that he had indeed introduced my father into the Party, which freed my father from serious trouble—after living for almost six years under a dark cloud of suspicion.
My parents shielded my father’s plight from all of us children. I was oblivious of his troubles; otherwise it would have put great psychological stress on me. A “bad” family background could severely limit one’s future, and children from families with a problem background did not have much of a chance in life. I would never have been allowed to go to college if my father had still been under investigation.
In 1972, during my third year in the Gobi, at the time I was making bricks, my mother finally wrote to tell me what my father had been through. She only did so because she could also tell me the news that he had joined a Chinese delegation to the United Nations Trade and Development Conference in Santiago, Chile, as an expert on customs affairs. China had only been readmitted to the United Nations the previous year, and this was the first time that delegates from the PRC joined a UN conference. The fact that my father had been named to the delegation meant that his problems were cleared.
By the time I returned to Beijing in September of 1975, my father had been posted to Mogadishu, Somalia, as a commercial attaché at the Chinese embassy. He would return home the following year. In the meantime, my sister, my younger brother, and I were all back in Beijing, and I was able to spend every weekend with my family in my parents’ home.
* * *
I registered at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Trade, or BIFT (today known as the University of International Business and Economics), located in the northern suburbs of Beijing, on the grounds of what used to be the Beijing Film Studio. Because there had not been any movies made for nearly 10 years, the studio had been abandoned and was now taken over by BIFT.
BIFT was about a 40-minute bus ride from my parents’ home, although you could cover the distance on a bicycle in about the same time. Between the bus terminus and the campus was open farmland, where peasants grew vegetables to feed the city. A dirt footpath led through the rows of vegetables to the campus gates.
Inside the wrought-iron gate of the campus, the footpath became a paved road. There was a messenger’s office on the left, just inside the gate, with one single telephone for the use of all the students. Past the messenger’s office was the cafeteria and a row of flat houses, among them a boiler room and public shower. On the right-hand side, there was a four-story classroom building. At the far end of the road was a three-story dormitory.
The institute had been founded in 1951 but, like almost all colleges, was shut down during the Cultural Revolution. It had reopened and moved to the current location a year or two earlier. Many of the old film studio facilities were not suitable for teaching. To the right of my dormitory were two odd-looking buildings. One was called Big Film Studio, a huge, windowless hangar with high ceilings and a small door, just like a movie studio on a back lot in Hollywood. It was now used occasionally to show movies or hold big meetings. The other was referred to as the Glass Building. The south and east sides of the building were made of clear glass, with no solid walls. I was told actors and actresses had come here to sunbathe without having to worry about getting too tanned because the glass would filter away ultraviolet rays.
A five-story building behind the cafeteria was used as a women’s dormitory, and there was a soccer field with a running track where we exercised. The school was still constructing some new buildings for teaching, but I estimated that the campus would not be completed until after we graduated. Still, I thought, the conditions for studying were good. There was plenty of space. Surrounded by expansive amounts of farmland, it was also quite secluded.
The living conditions felt like paradise after the Gobi. The food was infinitely better that the rations I had subsisted on in the desert. I did not have to worry about where the next meal would come from, or if there would be enough to eat. The common showers were in an old building with maybe two dozen showerheads. The shower room only opened two days a week, once for men and once for women. But the water was hot, and compared to the Gobi this was a luxury. On summer days when the shower room was not open, my classmates and I would sometimes sneak in and take cold-water showers to cool off from Beijing’s muggy heat.
* * *
I was relieved once I had formally registered as a student. In China, everyone had an official dossier that accompanied them wher
ever they went, but which they were never allowed to see. Only the authorities were privy to its contents. The dossier provided all the details of an individual’s personal background. If your previous employer had written some damning assessment in the dossier, it might doom your career forever, often without you ever knowing why. When a person moved from one work unit to another, it would not be considered official until the dossier had been transferred. The fact that I was allowed to register meant that my dossier had arrived at the institute without problems.
I would never know what my bosses in the Gobi had said about me in the dossier. I was thankful that no matter how much some of them disliked me, they had allowed me to leave—apparently without writing down anything seriously damaging against me. On the other hand, I reflected, there was really nothing bad they could say because, after all, I had worked hard and I was elected by my coworkers to go to college.
But I just could not get over the fact I was no longer in the Gobi. Every day, I was excited about being at the institute. I still feared that I might be called back to the Gobi. I had a recurring nightmare in which I was told that letting me go to college had all been a mistake, and I was ordered to go back to the Gobi. This nightmare haunted me for many years. I was always happy to wake up, to realize it was just a bad dream.
The institute was divided into four departments. The First Department taught English and was the largest. The Second Department, or the “small languages department,” taught a number of languages, including French, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and Arabic. The Third Department specialized in foreign trade, and the Fourth Department taught subjects related to customs administration.
I was enrolled in the First Department to study English. Our class of students was divided up and assigned to 10 classrooms of about 20 students each. Mine was the Second Classroom. Classrooms in Chinese universities were set up like homerooms in US elementary schools. Instead of carrying our books to different lecture halls, as university students would in the States, students would stay in the same room, at the same desk, and teachers of different subjects would come in and give lectures. Of the students in my classroom, there were 13 men and 7 women. Only two were natives of Beijing, myself and another boy, named Chen Min. One girl came from Shanghai. The rest of my classmates were from rural areas across China.
I believe the recruiters at BIFT had made an effort to recruit students as young as possible because they believed that the younger a person was, the easier it was for the person to learn a foreign language. The admissions policy required that students be selected from among the appropriate political classes: peasants, workers, or soldiers. A city youngster like myself would have had to work for a few years in the countryside, in factories, or in the military to qualify for acceptance. But someone from a peasant family was already qualified by birth. Therefore, much younger students could be recruited from rural areas.
I was just turning 22 when I started classes at BIFT in 1975. I had always been one of the youngest among my peers because I got into elementary school before I was seven years old. I was also among the youngest among my peers in the Gobi. But here at BIFT, I found myself one of the oldest in my class. Some of my classmates were still teenagers. I also felt older, having been through a lot more than most of my classmates, many of whom had never left their home village before coming to Beijing for college.
None of us had much formal education. But at least I had finished elementary school. Most of my classmates had not gotten that far before the schools were closed, and therefore lacked even a basic education. For many, their exposure to the world outside their villages was quite limited as well. Some of my classmates had never seen a train before coming to the institute. No matter how young you were, it was hard to learn words like embassy, airport, zoo, and restaurant if you didn’t know what they meant even in Chinese.
Since schools had been shut down for almost 10 years, there were not many qualified teachers around either. Wang Keli, the head teacher of my English class, and a few others had taught before the Cultural Revolution. Teacher Wang was in his fifties, tall, always smiling and easygoing. We all respected and trusted him. These older teachers were generally of much better quality, as they had received formal instruction. But many other teachers were about my age. They had just graduated as worker-peasant-soldier students themselves. One of them, a woman named Li Yan, was a 69er like myself, who also served in the Inner Mongolia Construction Army Corps. But she had managed to get out a few years before I did, and had recently graduated from the First Language Institute, China’s top school for foreign-language studies. It made my heart sink a bit. I felt as if I were already a few years behind where I should be in life.
I had studied English on my own for a number of years in the Gobi. The Voice of America had a daily radio program called English 900; one could learn English grammar rules and vocabulary by memorizing the 900 simple sentences it broadcast in a series of lessons. There was also an educational program on the BBC, but I found that the British spoke so fast that it was difficult for me to follow them. Though I had listened to VOA quite diligently, I had never spoken English with anyone. So when a teacher asked me if I spoke any English, no sooner had I opened my mouth to say Hello, how are you than he shut me up, aghast. You need to forget whatever pronunciation you came up with on your own, he told me.
Another handicap of mine was that I was not familiar with the alphabet. I had accumulated a modest English vocabulary by memorizing words when I was in the Gobi. But I never really bothered to learn the alphabet. If nobody was teaching you and if nobody spelled a word for you, what was the point? I had to start from the beginning.
Fortunately, all my classmates were starting from same place. While it was unrealistic to expect that everyone would be able to jump from elementary school to college, it became quickly apparent to me that the college education we were supposed to be receiving was not really college-level. Once I’d learned the alphabet, the classes quickly became too basic for me. I began to read the textbooks for second- and third-year classes, and books of other types. I spent a lot of time listening to tapes of English conversation. The teachers told us that the teaching philosophy at BIFT was “listening comprehension and speaking first, reading and writing second.” I found that priority suited me just fine. I had no trouble studying to read and write on my own, but I could not learn to understand spoken English, or how to speak it, without practice.
Our classroom was on the second floor. My desk was in the last row by the window, which looked out to the south. I could see trees, buildings, and factory chimneys in the distance. On a clear day, I could even see the new wing of the Beijing Hotel about 10 kilometers (∼6 miles) away. Built the year before and standing 20 stories high, it was the tallest and most modern building in the city at that time. There were elevators, I knew, although I had never stepped into one in my life, to take you to the higher floors. Rumor had it that when Mao’s wife visited the hotel, her elevator car had to be gently pulled up by hand because otherwise the speed would make her dizzy. The rumor was likely untrue, as I cannot imagine how one can pull up an elevator manually, but it shows how little we knew at the time.
I chose a desk in the corner in the last row not only because of the view but also because I could secretly read extracurricular books under my desk. My desk was usually piled high with textbooks, with the one on top always open. The teacher did not know I was reading something else in my lap when the instruction got boring, which happened more often than not.
All the men in my class lived in the same dorm room, which had seven double bunk beds. I had a top bunk. The best thing was the electric light. When we had electricity in our barracks in the Gobi, it was usually shut off at 9 p.m., our curfew time. But at the institute, all the classrooms were brightly lit with fluorescent light tubes. The dormitory was usually too crowded and dimly lit to read, so we often studied in our classroom until curfew.
I got to go home every weekend. My mother was overjoyed to have me
back in Beijing and in college.
* * *
It was great to be back in Beijing. I had only been home twice for home leave since leaving for the Gobi. On my first trip, in February 1972, my visit coincided with President Richard Nixon’s historic arrival in China. On a gray and hazy day with overcast skies and badly polluted air, I saw Nixon’s motorcade speed down Chang’an Boulevard in front of Tiananmen Square. There were no crowds on the street to cheer the US president, probably because the Chinese leadership wanted the first-ever visit by an American head of state to be low-key. The country needed time to come around to the idea of a relationship with a nation long seen as China’s imperialist archenemy.
By the time I returned from the Gobi there was a US Liaison Office in Beijing, run by a genial former oil executive named George H. W. Bush, who was known for bicycling around the city with his wife, Barbara. Bush, who had previously served as chairman of the Republican National Committee and as the US ambassador to the United Nations, was the second diplomat to be appointed chief of the US Liaison Office in China, serving from September 28, 1974, until December 5, 1975. For all practical purposes, it was an embassy, but it was not called one. A formal diplomatic relationship between the two countries was not established until 1979.
Coming back to the city from the Gobi, I felt that everything had shrunk in size. I was used to the vast open spaces of the desert. In contrast, everything in Beijing looked small and the streets felt narrow. Another big difference was the color of the sky. In the Gobi, the sky was always blue and bright. Beijing’s sky was almost always gray, especially on a windless and cloudy day. Many Chinese publications described pollution in foreign countries. But having seen what blue sky looked like, I was already quite conscious that Beijing’s air was badly polluted, especially in wintertime when there was so much coal being burned.