by Bei Dao
Entering the classroom one day, I received a huge shock upon seeing the students’ attire. Overnight they had all morphed as one, each dressed in a brand-new green army outfit that moonlighted as a school uniform — waists bound with a broad leather strap, Red Guard armbands proudly displayed, feet pedaling in big leather boots as they rode the most coveted bicycles, whizzing around in clusters. I remembered when I had first walked through the school gates, their ineffable oppressiveness, which, in fact, turned out to be a superiority complex; now, having passed through the incubation period, the infectious disease had broken out.
“If the father’s a hero, the son’s a worthy man / If the father’s a reactionary, the son’s a bad egg in a pan” — this slogan was born out of the moment, bundling everyone into its folds. It was quickly adapted into the “Battle Song of the Red Guard,” our class leader, Liu Huixuan, composing the tune — it brought him fame in one stroke. The last section of the song went: “If the father’s a hero, the son’s a worthy man / If the father’s a reactionary, the son’s a bad egg in a pan / If you make revolution, come take a stand / If you don’t make revolution, go flip your mama’s egg!” And always, “go flip your mama’s egg” would repeat endlessly in unison, like an echo in an empty valley.
In the debating sessions of those days, the opposing side’s first question would inevitably be: “What is your family background?” If your family background wasn’t acceptable, you were ushered onstage for a tongue-lashing or a harsh beating. I was born into a family of functionaries, but in the old, pre-liberation society, my father had worked in a bank, and so I was included on the list of the suspicious. Once again, I was excluded from the campaign and pushed out to the periphery.
At the edge of the playing field, while leaning against the school wall by a thicket of trees, I discovered an unlocked bicycle — its brakes worn, rust spots dotted the frame, wheel-spokes sparse, bell tied with a thin piece of rope, when pulled, ding-a-ling! After keeping watch for a few days, no one claimed it, and so I nonchalantly seized the treasure, just planning to borrow it for a while.
There’s an advantage to riding a ramshackle bike — wherever you park, there’s no need to lock it. Although it can’t exist in the same breath as a high-cadre official son’s Yongjiu Forever Model 13 Manganese Steel Bicycle, it suited me fine, the old bike being the first means of transportation that belonged to me. The thrill that arises from speed is something a biped cannot know from the daily experience of walking. I rode in and out of the revolutionary current, no longer relegating myself to the periphery, a self-deceiving illusion expanding in my mind that I was actually part of the front lines, the central core, the eye of the hurricane of the revolution. Much later in life I experienced a real epiphany reading Don Quixote, realizing that the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha had, in fact, gone mad not from books but from mounting his steed.
One day riding along Denei Street on my way to school, as I approached the Changqiao intersection ahead and coasted down the steep incline, the bicycle suddenly jolted up, sending me flying over the handlebars and tumbling headfirst toward a police sentry booth. A crowd instantly gathered around the rollicking scene of a man down. My whole body felt like an injury, though the worst thing was the utter public humiliation. It seemed like a serious warning to me, so I bravely retreated from the rushing torrent, and oh so quietly put the bicycle back in its original spot. Not half a day passed before it mysteriously disappeared.
4
On June 4, the Beijing municipality appointed a work team to be stationed in our school; on June 5, the whole school convened for the struggle session of Principal Yang Bin.
Later the same month, the second-year student Liu Yuan placed a letter on his father’s desk — which also happened to be the desk of the nation’s president. The letter was part of a behind-the-scenes scheme planned by a group of Upper 3 and Upper 5 students, the sons of high-cadre officials, who upon hearing through inner channels that the central government was considering the possibility of abolishing the college entrance exam, decided to seize the historic occasion and take action. On June 18, the People’s Daily printed separate articles about the written proposals of Beijing Middle No. 4 and Beijing Girls’ Middle No. 1 to abolish the antiquated college entrance exam system.
On August 4, a “reactionary student” disguised as a Red Guard was unmasked in the Wangfujing area, dragged back to the school, and beaten half dead on the playing field. Meanwhile, more than twenty school leaders and teachers were struggled against and paraded through the streets, then punched and kicked by several students; on August 25, some sons of high-cadre officials in Middle No. 4 organized the Capital City’s Red Guard Western District Policing Squad, or Xi Jiu (“western policing”), and then issued ten general orders in quick succession. . . .
Middle No. 4 became one of the central hubs of cultural revolutionary activity. Apart from big-character posters that made the land quake and skies shake, all kinds of secret activities were plotted there, leading the way to the emergence of many different factional organizations. Because of the family background issue, relations between students slowly disintegrated. This is how an “aristocratic” school unexpectedly shed its guise of elegant simplicity, exposing its sinister face.
What shocked me most at the time concerned C., a timid student in our class. He wrote a “thought report” for the Youth League about his intimate sexual fantasies, which included explicit descriptions of breasts and female genitalia. Who would’ve thought that the details of his confession would be publicized on a big-character poster and become the object of everyone’s gossip and laughter? And that C. would then be labeled a reactionary student and vanish from everyone’s life? And who publicized his confession in the first place?
August 18, I joined the crowds at Tiananmen Square to see Chairman Mao give an audience to the Red Guards for the first time. We lined up early at Liu Bu Kou, the crossroads of the Six Ministries, and while waiting, the streaming hordes swallowed us, pushing us forward in an enormous wave toward the square. We hopped like sparrows and whooped with delight; turning our gaze to the Tiananmen Rostrum, we couldn’t see anything, only numerous green specks, among which, I figured, mingled Chairman Mao. In the depths of that feverish memory, all those green specks remain strangely hypervivid in my mind.
The violence intensified with the summer heat — everywhere there were struggle sessions, public paradings, household ransackings, beatings. The stench of blood spread across Beijing City as the infamous Red August pressed on, making people shiver in the swelter.
August 2, 1966, marked my seventeenth birthday. Daylight, no one home. I opened the curtains, lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling, my mood hitting bottom. At this pivotal point in my life, I tried to reassess the past and peer into the future, but everything seemed fuzzy, indiscernible, my heart empty, vacuous.
Thirty-five years passed, and I returned to Beijing to see my ailing father. I rode in a taxi with my brother past Ping’an Avenue on the way to our parents’ home. My brother pointed to a white, modern-looking building behind a wrought-iron fence, asking offhandedly, “You recognize that place?” I cast about for clues in my mind, but nothing clicked; I blankly shook my head. “That’s Middle No. 4.”
5
Back then, in the whole of Beijing there were only four designated “exceptionally distinguished” secondary-school teachers: Two of them belonged to Middle No. 4, the chemistry teacher Liu Jingkun and the physics teacher Zhang Zi’e, both of them officially recognized as “national treasures.” One year, Teacher Zhang also taught Upper 3 physics, and reportedly wrote four of the six physics questions for the college entrance exam that year. Handing in their tests well before the allotted time, the students loudly shouted, “Long live Teacher Zhang!”
The trigonometry teacher Li Yutian had triangular eyes and a chin shaved to an ashen hue. He always arrived to class a few minutes early to draw the day’s problem on the blackbo
ard, his scrawl indecipherable to me, like a ghost-repelling charm. While my vision haloed out, the rest of the class could already see the bamboo in their mind before painting it, mentally preparing their answers and readying a hand to raise before anyone else. Teacher Li didn’t fret, didn’t hurry, as he scanned the room in an arc with his triangular eyes, habitually rubbing his ashen chin, slowly, leisurely, his voice calling out a name in a thick Li County, Hebei accent, “Zhao — Zhen — Kai,” lengthening the “kai” as a falling-rising third tone, rather than first, hooking the heart and soul even further. For every question posed I gave three I-don’t-knows. As a matter of fact, this became the source of a long-lasting anxiety for me: Many years later when helping my daughter with her homework, she mentioned the word “trigonometry” and I instantly felt dizzy and nauseous.
Study magazine stopped publication in 1958, its editor switching jobs to become a teacher, and, as chance would have it, Huang Qingfa came to be our Chinese instructor. A little over forty and balding, his wry smiled made him look as if he were apologizing for his own existence. Teacher Huang taught classical prose with remarkable proficiency, while even letting us write our own annotations. Reading aloud Liu Zongyuan’s “Account of Little Stone Pond,” he’d rock back and forth, head nodding and rolling: “Walking west one hundred paces from the little knoll, to a bamboo grove, distant trickle of a running stream, like the clinking of jade belt rings, heart’s music — ” Breaking off here, he’d quote his annotation for “heart’s music”: “That is, ‘to be happy,” then continued to read the passage aloud. I never expected that I, with my uninspired imitations, painting a tiger from the image of a cat, would receive recognition for my annotative marginalia. And so, strolling up to the front of the class, as if the young urchin could expound, I delivered my rendition. Pleased as pleased could be, I embarked on the “Little Stone Pond,” rocking back and forth, head nodding and rolling, pleasure elevating, and coming upon “heart’s music,” I also broke off and proceeded to read my own marginalia — “rather not bad” (powei bucuo), though mispronouncing ‘po’ as a ‘pi’ sound, thus noting it as “farting’s not bad” — the whole class doubled over with laughter.
Our Russian teacher Ling Shijun had a plump head and big ears; he wasn’t particularly conceited, and yet a certain amount of arrogance did seep through his bones. Every class he’d carry a tiny card with notes on it pinched between his fingers, though somehow he’d prattle on and on without end, dulu dulu dulu, as if some kind of linguistic magic trick. He had published a monograph on Russian grammar, and was also fluent in Japanese — rumor had it that he had taught himself Russian from a Japanese textbook. Teacher Ling had another brilliant feat up his sleeve — he could recline on the surface of the school’s swimming pool while reading the newspaper at the same time, hands and feet motionless. I didn’t study Russian very attentively, but studied this brilliant feat on the sly, one unmindful slip and two mouthfuls of water poured in.
Whenever our English teacher Xiang Lixie strolled around campus, he always attracted attention. In order to teach English, he had learned how to behave like an English gentleman: In the summer he wore a white suit; in the winter he wore shorts with suspenders, long, white gartered socks, and polished leather shoes. He brought a whole set of cutlery to class, displayed on a napkin, to demonstrate the customs Western-style food involved. We heard that he had tested at the top of his class at a missionary school, where the foreign teacher there once invited him to her home for tea, and while serving him a piece of pound cake, he said something incorrectly in English, whereupon as punishment she took the cake away. . . .
The two physical education teachers, Han Maofu and Wu Jimin, both refereed in the national basketball league. Han Maofu was smart, competent, and of average height. Wu Jimin was tall, strong as a horse, and asked everyone to call him Big Wu. As the story goes, the Soviet women’s national basketball team came to the capital to compete against China’s national team. Han Maofu wore the whistle on the floor; Big Wu commanded the referee’s table. In the grueling game’s final minutes — the teams neck and neck, neither able to pull away — the two secretly conspired to stop the clock and add more time. The Soviet team discovered the ruse and raised a protest, which resulted in Big Wu being demoted to a lower-level referee.
Principal Yang Bin emerged out of the Yan’an Shanbei Public School, and after the revolution, contributed to important eyewitness accounts regarding the activities of Ye Qun, savvy political leader and the wife of military commander and vice premier, Lin Biao. During the post-liberation years, she served as headmistress of Girls’ Middle No. 1 before moving on to Middle No. 4 in 1965. It was said that between being the director of the Beijing Municipal Education Bureau and the principal of Middle No. 4, she chose the latter.
Vice Principal Liu Tieling puffed and puffed with smug self-satisfaction. The Red Guards brought his diary to light, which exposed details of his personal ambitions: age twenty become school party committee member; age thirty become district party committee member; age forty become municipal party committee member; age fifty become central committee member. Everything progressed according to his plan — at the start of the Cultural Revolution, he was just over forty and already a municipal party committee member.
Who could have foreseen that these teachers and principals would become a disgrace overnight, all their culture and learning swept away with a wave of the hand? The eruption darkened the sky and rushed across the land in the form of big-character posters and endless struggle sessions. High tide arrived on August 4, 1966, a Sunday. More than twenty teachers and school leaders were paraded around with tall paper hats atop their heads and wooden signboards around their necks, until at last they were led to the playing field, where they staggered through the throngs of screaming students, who shamed them with epithets while punching and kicking them. Then they were forced to sing the “Battle Song of the Sorrowful Ghost” in unison: “I am an ox-ghost snake-demon / I am guilty before the people / I am guilty / I am damned / The people’s iron hammer / Has smashed me and mashed me up. . . .” Among the numerous voices, Vice Principal Liu Tieling’s projected out with the most resonance.
During one struggle session organized by the People Liberation Army’s Propaganda Team, Big Wu leaped up and pointed his finger at Principal Yang Bin, saying, “Yang Bin, you dare to oppose the PLA!” followed by an arm-flapping shout, “Down with the PLA!” Bewildered, startled awake, he slowly realized his huge mistake as his face turned pale with fear, and Big Wu stammered out, “I am guilty . . . I confess my guilt to Chairman Mao and ask to be punished.” Then, as if in the presence of the chairman himself, he stooped forward, butt sticking out, large bean-size beads of sweat pipa pipa tumbling down.
The suicide of the Chinese teacher Liu Chengxiu filled me with terror. During the Clean Up the Class Ranks Campaign, she was put under investigation, which led to her son’s discharge from the army. Around five in the morning that day, behind the cafeteria in a narrow street, she cut open her throat with a pair of scissors, a sight too horrifying to bear, people said. That an accomplished, healthy middle-aged woman could go as far as this, to such an extreme and end her life. As news of the tragedy reached the little courtyard of the dorms, I had been lighting a fire in Study Six, the smoke so chokingly thick I couldn’t open my eyes.
6
I moved onto campus at the start of August 1966. The student dorms were on the southeast corner by the Teaching and Research Courtyard, an isolated area with two rows of single-story buildings facing each other. Each room, furnished with bunk beds, varied in size and were arranged sequentially with the label “study” followed by a number. I first moved into Study Thirteen, then to Study Six, my life in the dorm totaling more than two years. The dorms originally housed only those students who lived far from the school, but due to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, no one cared and everyone moved in, one after another.
News and rumors spread quickl
y under one shared, run-down roof, along little byways and walls with ears. Whenever the furnace spit out its thick billows of smoke, neighbors would start to cough at the same time. Before the revolution, it had been lights-out at ten p.m., the warning bell ringing ten minutes before ten. One needed to cross the dorm courtyard a ways to reach the bathroom, and as it was just us boys at the school with few scruples, residents would rush out in a constant stream to piss into the pond or under a tree. The foul, pungent smell of urine wafted out from the courtyard incessantly. Ten minutes to ten every night, the student counselor Yu Qizhong would frequent the area for an inspection; mission accomplished, his actions turned into the tale, spread far and wide, of “Yu the Great taming the urinary waters.”
One of my roommates, Z., the son of a high-ranking cadre, loved to boast and speak in jokes — as well as lust after girls — a very fun comrade to have around. One night at the end of August, he came to tell me that he had caught some local felons, locked them in the dorm basement, and asked if I wanted to take a peek. Out of curiosity I followed him, and crouching outside the basement window, I peered inside.
That night, with Z. as the head interrogator, two “veteran soldiers” dressed in army fatigues played the role of thugs. Those “felons,” naked from the waist up, knelt on the floor. Z. proceeded to ask them something in a sharp voice, his words vague and ambiguous; one thug swung his crude iron shackle up and brought it — huala huala! — crashing down onto Z.’s shoulder, a bloodstain immediately soaking through his clothes. The shackle whirled up again and Z. quickly restrained it. . . . Unable to watch anymore, I returned to the dorm room and lay down on my bed. Z. didn’t come back until around midnight. With a bit of pride mixed with exhilaration, he asked me what I thought; I changed the subject. I couldn’t remove him from that cruel scene in my mind, so we gradually drifted apart. Not long after that I moved to Study Six.