by Ming Wang
As we studied the contents of the jars, I fixated on how close these dead bodies were to us behind the bookcases. As the anatomy teacher droned on, I would listen attentively for any bit of sound coming from the coffins. Whenever I thought I heard something, I would jump in my seat. I worried incessantly that one of the corpses would rise from its resting place in the coffin, but to my relief, none came back to life … except at night in my dreams! I had nightmares for months on end. The more time I spent studying the structures of the dissected, disintegrated human bodies during the day, the more vivid these dreams became at night. The corpses would come out of their coffins, plaintively seeking their missing parts. Handless, footless, and headless beings, their festering skin falling from their frames, would reach for me until I woke up gasping, sweating all over, the smell of death still lingering in my nostrils.
I was deeply relieved when we finally finished our anatomy sessions and I could escape the horrors lurking in the lab.
My tutor overflowed with praise when he discussed my progress with my parents. “You have a young genius on your hands!” he declared. “He has caught up with the other students in just two months and is ready now for regular classes in human anatomy.”
I then started attending medical-school every day, although still doing so illegitimately. I sat in the back row of a large lecture hall trying to blend in with the students who were authorized to be there, most of whom were much older than I was. My mom and dad sometimes taught at the podium themselves as well. When they did, they expected to see me there, and I always was. I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do anyway. I tried to listen to what the instructors were teaching, but it all seemed to me so meaningless, since I knew clearly that there was no chance that I would never be allowed to become a doctor. I stared out the windows at other people living their everyday lives in a society that had no place for me. Though the nightmares eventually faded, no new dreams took their place. There was nothing but emptiness in my life as far as I could see.
I never saw the girl from the lab again, but I did start to notice an older girl who always sat in the front row of the lecture hall. She was in her twenties, so beautiful, and since I was a teenager, I was more interested in studying live human anatomy than the dead kind. I stared at her throughout class, unable to focus on the lectures. If she ever looked back and offered me even the slightest smile, the moment would carry me through the entire day. That would be the closest I ever got to her—or any girl—for many years to come. Throughout my schooling in Communist China, girls and boys were strongly discouraged from forming friendships, and dating was strictly prohibited on school or college campuses. Even the eight model plays—the nation’s only entertainment for years—were devoid of any love stories. To be romantically or sexually involved before marriage was considered bourgeois, and not in line with proletarian values. The communist government classified any romance or marriage as a “personal problem” that needed to be “solved” before one could move on and do more important things to serve the Communist Party. Romance was foreign to me at that time, a luxury I simply couldn’t afford anyway. I was overwhelmed with simply trying to survive. All of my time and energy were spent in desperate attempts to find a future with some semblance of hope and happiness.
My father was a well-known cardiovascular doctor and an expert in hematology. Along with other medical students, I sometimes accompanied him as he made his rounds at the hospital. He took us to see patients, and he would ask questions and then listen and respond to the students’ answers. As the professor’s son, I was treated with respect, even though I was young and my oversized lab coat draped to the floor. For the first time, I had a taste of what it might truly be like to be a doctor. From my place in that circle, I beamed with pride at my father. I longed to be like him and to be a part of our family’s profession.
Slowly but surely, I became more and more interested in the medicine that I was studying. I found it fascinating how human body worked, and how we could actually understand it and find a way to cure illnesses and help people. Though I was not studying medicine legally and had no chance to become a doctor, in my own heart I was dearly hoping that if I did master the material well, really well, I might have perhaps the slimmest chance of being allowed to become a doctor one day!
One morning, as I got ready to leave for school, my father stopped me. He again had to inform me with a profound sadness that another door had been closed on my future.
“Ming-xu, starting today, you will no longer be returning to medical-school,” he said with a heavy sigh.
For the second time in my life, my dad had to discontinue my education! He said that as soon as the medical-school administration discovered I was attending classes without permission, they threatened to fire my father unless I left immediately.
So I was expelled … from a school at which I wasn’t even enrolled!
For days I stayed home, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.
I had embraced my father’s challenge to study medicine “simply for the sake of knowledge,” and now I couldn’t understand why that was not even allowed. Unlike many medical students who got into the school through communist family connections and hence did not really care about studying at all, I did care and wanted to learn! I had been getting so excited lately about the medical knowledge that I was learning that I began to dream that there might just be a chance that I could be allowed to become a doctor one day! Now even that hope got completed crushed and the harsh reality sunk in. I realized that even though I had been a good student with straight A’s, without the right connections to communist cadres, I would never ever be allowed back in any school or given any further chance to learn!
My father saw how despondent I was.
“Ming, remember that life’s path is hardly ever a straight line. There are always lots of zigzags before you find your way,” he said. “Always have hope. Never give up hope.”
From my bed, I watched shadows lengthen across the floor. I remembered the silhouettes my childhood puppets used to cast on the gray walls around me. The happy childhood memories faded with the shadows into the approaching darkness of the night. Were all my happy memories relegated only to my earliest years? Would there only be darkness ahead for me? I was gripped by a familiar fear as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. I realized that no matter how hard I tried to fight back against misfortune, the darkness always seemed to be able to catch back on me, the black dot, the cadavers, the ever-present risk of deportation. I wanted so much to escape from these ghosts, and run to light and freedom.
Sometime later, a former classmate from junior high, Hui Liu, introduced me to a young man named Tian-ma Wu, whose father had been killed during the Cultural Revolution. Prior to his death, he had been a famous playwright, the Arthur Miller of China. His most famous play featured an ancient city whose citizens rioted against its rulers. The play was interpreted by the communist government as an attack on the current regime, so Tian-ma Wu’s father was declared a counter-revolutionary, arrested, and executed.
On execution days, the city held a ceremony in the public square. The accused stood on a stage wrapped in robes, with large cardboard panels hanging around their necks that displayed their names. Soldiers held the prisoners’ heads down, and as each prisoner’s name was announced, the panel was flipped around. If each character of the person’s name was crossed off one by one, that prisoner could live and would be sent to prison for life. But if the characters were crossed with a long, singular red mark, the prisoner was condemned to immediate death. Large crowds, sometimes as many as several thousand people, gathered to watch these public spectacles. Each turn of the panel was a bone-chilling moment of life or death, followed by a collective shriek from the crowd.
The doomed were then driven in military trucks to the base of a hill at the edge of the city. There they sunk to their knees, and each one fell forward as shots rang out from guns pointed at the back of his or her head.
When I f
irst met Tian-ma, I wondered if he had stood in one of those crowds of people in the public square. Had he seen the mark as it was written across his father’s name?
I thought of the coffins at the medical-school.
Tian-ma was seventeen, I was fifteen, and neither of us were allowed to go to school, nor could we find jobs, so we both faced deportation. But with the loss of his father, he carried a sorrow even much deeper than mine.
Like his dad, Tian-ma was a talented writer and had composed many poems. Together with Hui Liu, another gifted scribe, we gathered in Tian-ma’s tiny bedroom, where each wall was covered from top to bottom with pages of our novels, poems, and drawings.
“Ming, how can we make a life for ourselves?” Tian-ma wondered. “Hui and I are writers. What can you do?”
“I can dance and I love music. I can also play the erhu.”
“You should learn music composition,” he said. “Then we might be able to find work if we can compose songs together.”
I immediately delved into the art of music composition and put melodies together for many of Tian-ma and Hui’s verses. One such piece was “A Prisoner’s Song,” written by Tian-ma. It described a city deprived of freedom and joy. “At the foot of the mountain, there’s my hometown. There is no water, no sunshine. People walk through town listless, expressionless, without joy or happiness. Let’s do it; let’s break through the handcuffs on our hands and let’s break through the prison, for freedom! We are prisoners. We have to fight for our freedom.”
We worked hard, filling our days with writing and composing. We completed about fifty songs and even an entire opera. We submitted several works to music magazines, but nothing was ever published. Years later I realized that, given the subject matter of our songs, we were actually quite fortunate that no one paid close attention to them. Through our music, we expressed our longing for freedom, education, and opportunity. I didn’t realize at the time just how daring our songs were. “The Prisoner’s Song” alone could have gotten us jailed or put on the stage of the public square and executed.
We were so young, and yet our short lives had already been so scarred, full of tragedy and heartache. And the future offered no promise, no relief. I had tried everything I could think of, and it had all failed. The fighting spirit expressed in those songs was on the brink of being extinguished.
My parents, who had fought alongside me as I sought a career of any kind, were also on the verge of giving up. My mother despaired that deportation awaited me no matter what we tried.
“You have to find a job,” my father insisted. “Just go find something, anything, or the government will find you idle and deport you immediately.”
So after all of these years fighting and trying, I finally gave up trying to craft a career, and instead took a job doing the lowest-paying work available in the city.
Early each morning I rode a wobbly, rusty bike through the streets of Hangzhou, alongside hundreds of other commuters. A flood of people on bikes merged at each stoplight. It was summertime and everyone wore white, short-sleeve shirts or T-shirts, as color of any kind was not allowed. I waited at the light with them, gripping my handlebars, my foot on the ground, poised and ready to go. When the light changed and it was time to move forward, we surged ahead like a tidal wave flowing through the streets, everyone pedaling as quickly as possible.
A half hour later, I arrived at a publishing factory and entered through an enormous steel gate. The factory had recently published The Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 5. I joined a dozen older women at a table to wrap bundles of books in heavy brown paper, which were then stacked on carts to be shipped across the country.
Once a bright and promising student, now I was at the lowest pay rate, stuck at the bottom rung of society with no hope for advancement. Sadness overwhelmed me as I realized that all my efforts to hold onto the hope of having a future had failed—playing the erhu, practicing dance, studying medicine, and composing music. I couldn’t imagine doing the mind-numbing, repetitive, low-paying work for the rest of my life. Wrapping stack after stack of books caused my hands to cramp and my back to slouch and stiffen, and my toil only produced enough money for a nightly meal of rice and vegetables.
I was paid the equivalent of ten U.S. cents a day, and my first biweekly paycheck amounted to just one dollar. Regardless of the meager pittance, I was relieved that I was finally able to contribute something to my family after more than two years of feeling useless and unproductive.
But that first paycheck ended up being the last one I would receive from wrapping books, as fourteen days after I started that job, my dad came home with a shocking news that would change the course of history in China. The newspaper headline was minor, the announcement only a few lines long, but the implications were enormous. The stoplight had finally changed to “go.” Finally, I and the rest of China would be moving in an entirely different direction.
Chapter 5
New Hope Dawns
“Do you hear that?” I whispered. My friend and I were sitting on the floor of my family’s apartment. We had been looking at the colorful collections of stamps, candy wrappers and cigarette packs that I had carefully amassed and arranged into homemade albums since I was a young boy. I held a page by its corner, my hand suspended above the book. My friend cocked his head to listen. His eyes widened.
The sound was the unmistakable tune of a funeral procession. The music wafted from radios in every room along the hallway. Without a word, my friend got up and ran to his own family’s apartment, with me following close behind him. We entered to find his family hushed and apprehensive.
The reporter announced, with an unemotional tone, “Chairman Mao is dead.”
I quickly left my friend’s apartment and made my way outside.
It was a warm afternoon on Thursday, September 9, 1976. I raced through the streets of Hangzhou to Tian-ma’s apartment and into his tiny bedroom, with its verse-plastered walls.
He was napping, but I shook him awake and told him what had just happened. For a moment he looked pensive, but then a smile slowly appeared on his face.
“That’s the best news I’ve ever heard,” he said with a grin. Mao’s Cultural Revolution had destroyed China. It cut off the future for nearly twenty million young people and claimed more than a million lives. With Mao now dead, the madness finally came to an end. Government officials realized they wouldn’t be able to hold on to power any longer if people were forced to continue to live in such a misery, poverty, and chaos. Deng Xiaoping rose to prominence and defeated Mao’s followers, who had insisted on political ideology over the well-being of the people. The new pragmatic administration under Deng launched a series of unprecedented social and economic reforms that resulted in several subsequent decades of renewal and economic transformation in China.
On the evening that I brought home my biweekly one-dollar paycheck from the printing factory and proudly showed it to my mom, my dad came home, carrying a newspaper as if it were a winning trophy.
“Look at this!” He pointed to a tiny, two-inch announcement in a corner of the page. When I saw what it said, I gasped.
“So it’s true then?” I asked, almost afraid to hope.
“Yes! The college entrance exam is coming back!”
For ten years (1966-1976), the national college entrance exam had been shelved, and students had been denied any higher education—including me. With Mao now gone and the Cultural Revolution finally over, China’s leaders realized how tragic a mistake that was, and Deng Xiaoping made the decision to resume university admissions testing. All the universities that had been shut down during the Cultural Revolution would now be back in business.
I returned to the factory for the last time, since I was now allowed to go back to school, and told the people at my workstation that it was going to be my last day. They regretted seeing me leave, but gave me their best wishes. They told me they were sure I was meant for something bigger and better. Even though I had never enjoyed the ty
pe of work I did there, my fellow employees were gentle and caring, so I knew I would miss them.
At the end of the day, as I headed for the door, I shouted back to my coworkers, “I’ll see you all in fifty years!” What would my life look like decades from that moment? I had no idea, but what I did know was that I finally had the hope that it could be more than what I had been allowed to imagine. I left that job not really knowing if I would get into college, but at least now I had a chance!
That night at dinner, my family was buzzing with excitement at the possibility that someday I might actually be going to college.
“In hindsight, I so wish we hadn’t taken Ming-xu out of high-school,” my mom said. “Now it will be so much harder for him to do well on the college entrance exam, since it requires a high-school education.”
My goodness, Mom was right. In all the excitement, I hadn’t thought about how much more difficult it would be for me now to get into college than for others who had not missed out on the past two years of high-school education. Catching up on that much material in a short period of time would be nearly impossible. The regret my mother had just expressed washed over me and left me feeling overwhelmed. I had wasted the past two years desperately trying to find a profession to avoid deportation when I should have been in high-school studying. I would have had a decent chance of making it into college had I actually gone to high-school, but now it seemed nearly impossible!