City Gate, Open Up

by Bei Dao

  The fluid living situation in the dorms continued through the revolution. In the spring of 1967, a new boarder, Liu Yuan, moved into Study Six; his father had been the nation’s former president. Liu Yuan slept in an upper bunk and, downcast and sullen, usually went straight to sleep whenever he returned to the dorm. During our almost nightly ritual of sharing ghost stories, however, he’d tilt his ears to listen, too — the lights switched off, the spooky vocalizations, the washbasin and bed rail ready to be tossed to the ground at the key moment. Then, more than a month later, he mysteriously disappeared.

  The school meals were dreadful, and so, under the cover of night, we’d sneak into the cafeteria to pilfer some white cabbage and coal, and cook for ourselves. And because stoves remained unlit in the classrooms that winter, students came to Study Six to warm up. To gain admittance, though, each visitor needed to hand over sufficient coinage before the door could be opened. Many stamped their feet and cursed, and yet, in a world of ice and snow, with nowhere else to go, better to pay the bandits at the pass. We also collected unwanted papers, books, and newspapers, to sell to the salvage station. Empty bottles quickly filled up with change and, rubbing our palms with delight, we’d first agree on the menu, head out to procure provisions, and then heartily gorge ourselves until we couldn’t stand up.

  7

  Beijing Middle No. 4 functioned as both an “aristocratic” school and a school for the general public. This dual identity manifested itself as a kind of inner schism, a schism that wasn’t so obvious at first, possibly even deliberately concealed as suggested before, but the Cultural Revolution pushed it to the fore, transforming it into a vast chasm.

  The classroom building consisted of one two-story structure; conditions were frugal, with no central heating during the winter, and once it got cold, charcoal stoves had to be brought in. Most of the children of impoverished families brought their own lunches, which they fixed in an aluminum container carried in a mesh bag, and during the break between classes, dropped the containers off at the cafeteria’s big steamer to heat up. Some simplified the process and just put their lunch on top of the coal stove, causing wonderful smells to drift through the classroom air.

  To eat in the cafeteria cost three mao three fen for a regular lunch, and one mao six fen for just the staple foods, like rice or noodles. Several hundred people could fit in its enormous space, and ten people could sit around a table, but given the absence of chairs, it was standing room only, dine where you pleased. The staff bosses used wooden poles to carry in the huge casks, triggering a stir of activity in the stomachs of the youth. Each table sent a representative with two washbasins to stand in line — one for a staple food and the other for a vegetable dish. Principal Yang Bin realized the school lunches weren’t meeting the proper nutritional requirements and proposed raising the cost for students to four mao per meal in order to add a quality meat dish every other day; more than half of the students, however, didn’t respond to her proposal, which showed how poor the average family really was in those days. When the Cultural Revolution intensified, this initiative would be brought up as one of the many criminal charges against Yang Bin, for her revisionism and for inciting division between the students.

  As we grappled with puberty, the sour taste of hunger followed us everywhere. Students pasted up a big-character poster: “Praise a meal of two corn-cone buns / The food line stretches clear to the sky / Boss Feng’s fat face laughs in the window / Students wait at the gate weak and cold-to-the-bone.”

  After the Cultural Revolution broke out, the suspension of classes led to bedlam in the cafeteria. The school stipulated that it could only refund staple-food meal tickets at one mao six fen per diem. Yifan told me that he had gone to the cafeteria window to return his meal tickets, and Liu Yuan, ahead of him in line, began to argue with the cafeteria manager, Liu Qingfeng. They exchanged some heated words, and then Liu Yuan got slapped with a complete snub: “Not good enough — bring written proof of receipt and come back.” Liu Yuan’s face and ears turned red with anger as he stormed away in a fury. Not long after this, Liu Qingfeng was swept away by the Clean Up the Class Ranks Campaign, and eventually drowned himself in a river.

  This mulberry-field world, where the immortal Magu watched the sea turn into a mulberry field, and a mulberry field turn into the sea, where a noble son meets with misfortune according to the changing of the tides — this is an old tale for all ages. Much later I heard Liu Yuan made his mark high up in the world of government politics; I only hope he never forgot those down-and-out days, the atmosphere of utter abjection, and that they enable him to act with more empathy toward common citizens.

  8

  Toward the beginning of September 1966, I built a small case of wood and painted these words on it in red: “Engrave Chairman Mao’s words in your brain, let them melt into your bloodstream and translate into real action.” Soon after putting four volumes of Mao’s writings into the small case, I rushed to Jishuitan Hospital to visit my father. He had fallen off a ladder while brushing a slogan, breaking his left wrist. I didn’t bring any fruit or other nourishment, just a little bust of Mao that I placed on the stand beside his bed.

  Through a letter of recommendation, six of us, all classmates from common family backgrounds, signed up for the nation’s Great Linkup, where students traveled from village to village as a way to build revolutionary ties. After spending two days with my father in the hospital, I strapped the small wood case with Mao’s books onto my back and hit the road.

  Returning to Beijing in early November, the situation had changed dramatically due to the criticisms emerging from the “bloodline debate,” which thoroughly destabilized the central position of the old Red Guards. Children of the masses relied on all sorts of rebel factions to rise to the occasion, including the one our class organized called the Red Summit Battle Patrol.

  At the start of spring 1967, the rebel factions on campus combined to establish the New Middle No. 4 Commune. Secondary schools throughout Beijing were divided into the April Third Faction and the April Fourth Faction — the New Middle No. 4 Commune belonged to the former. The April Third Battle Bulletin issued the following declarations in “Considering the New Zeitgeist: The April Third Faction Manifesto”: “to carry out the redistribution of property and power,” “to dismantle the privileged class.” Beneath the turmoil of factional infighting, such political and societal appeals seemed quite reasonable. I later became close friends with the philosopher Zhang Xianglong, whose older brother, Zhang Xiangping, worked as one of the chief writers for the commune.

  Two years ago marked Beijing Middle No. 4’s hundredth anniversary, which I heard was commemorated with much pomp and circumstance. What, I wondered, should my alma mater celebrate? The former principal Liu Tieling gave a speech at the ceremony, his voice presumably as clear and resonant as ever. But I can’t forget that summer day in 1966, the sight of him with the other teachers being struggled against, all of them singing the “Battle Song of the Sorrowful Ghost” together in one voice.

  9

  “Let me tell you: If any of you in Study 6 lose something, it will involve me, Zhang Yuhai!” I looked out through the dirty glass on the small window and saw his tall, slim frame, his hands on his hips, wearing a worn backpack, and his pimples bulging out of his face as he shouted. I told him Yifan wasn’t in, and he left, cursing under his breath. Ever since Zhang Yuhai grew tight with Yifan, Study 6 knew no peace; everyone grew weary of his spleen, and urged Yifan to spend less time with him.

  Zhang Yuhai belonged to Upper 2 Class 2, which had no dealings with our Upper 1 Class 5. Apart from all of us belonging to the New Middle No. 4 Commune, we spent time together in Study Six, drawn together by the same stink — an antiestablishment ideology. Even though we were pulled into the tidal wave of the Cultural Revolution, we still preserved our playful spirit of mischief. As Zhang Yuhai put it, “Politics overflowed with theater, and theater overflowed with politics
.”

  It must be said, though, that he was an exceptional student. The school offered an advanced placement system for certain classes, where students could study the subject on their own and test out of the class. In the advanced placement test for math, Zhang Yuhai only used up half the time before turning in his exam, and received a perfect score. Apart from math, he also tested out of English. During the revolution, he presided over a discussion forum on mathematics reform, the distinguished teacher Zhang Zi’e also participating. He turned from a host to a guest and back again, weaving linkages seamlessly onto the blackboard, eyebrows dancing, face beaming. If it weren’t for society’s current upheavals, he already had the makings of a professor.

  Besides his studies, Zhang Yuhai excelled in basketball, swimming, violin — practically everything he undertook he mastered. Playing the tin whistle, in particular, he proved to be a remarkable talent — puckering his lips around the mouthpiece, he used every muscle in his cheeks to control the airflow, the long, long tune resonating out so smoothly, piercing heaven and earth. It was through his playing that I discovered Georges Bizet’s “Pastorale.” Whenever I hear that piece of music it still reminds me of his whistling.

  Zhang Yuhai was the fourth child in his family, three elder brothers above him. His father had studied abroad in England and, not long after coming back to the motherland, died in a car accident. His mother worked in a university library and raised her children on her own.

  The one thing Zhang Yuhai couldn’t bear was mediocrity. Of an ambitious student who aspired to climb the social ladder: “He’ll certainly be very successful, but by age forty he’ll be bald.” Yuhai asserted this while imitating the manners of a cadre officer, sinking lazily into a sofa, hands resting on his belly as his thumbs twiddled round and round.

  Upper 2 Class 2 possessed enormous reserves of energy, and for a while even managed the publication of two papers. Mou Zhijing was the editor in chief of the Secondary School Cultural Revolution News, which published Yu Luoke’s famous essay, “Family Background Doctrine”; Zhang Yuhai, along with other students, ran the Harbinger of Spring News. Yuhai chose the name of the paper, lifting it from a verse of Mao’s to make a double-edged title. The second issue published his piece “Indoctrinating Family Background,” which directly engaged with Yu Luoke’s article, echoing its arguments. Comparing the two papers, the influence of Secondary School Cultural Revolution News was much greater, copies circulating across the nation, while Harbinger of Spring News also basked in the other paper’s light, benefiting from its popularity. I helped them sell copies on the street, hawking my wares. Once people heard Middle No. 4 was involved, and that the family background and class origin issues were being discussed, they fell over each other to purchase copies.

  Upper 2 Class 2’s paper operation took the city by storm, creating an enormous commotion; Upper 1 Class 1, unwilling to lag behind, followed Yifan’s lead and decided to make a memorial badge. The proposed design displayed the busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao above the words “New Middle No. 4 Commune” in red characters. Making use of all our skills and resources, we went to the Seventh Ministry of Engineering, which previously headed the government’s space program, to retrieve optimal-quality aluminum sheets; we enlisted artists from the Central Academy of Fine Arts to design it, and asked the Beijing Enamel Factory to manufacture the mold. While waiting for the mold, an unexpected branch shot forth from a knot in the tree: Orders from above decreed that Mao’s image must not be placed side by side with the four other great leaders.

  In the late autumn of 1967, around a dozen students from Upper 1 Class 5 and Upper 2 Class 2 convened at the enamel factory outside Yongding (“Eternally Fixed”) Gate at the south entrance of the old city. Zhang Yuhai and Xu Jinbo, a student in my class, organized the operation. As history teaches us, when waging a battle, first position the troops — Shi Kangcheng, Lang Fang, and Wu Weiguo kept watch by the factory gate, a bicycle at the ready; various nimble legs and feet were positioned along the way from the entrance gate to the machine room, each foot soldier pretending to be an anonymous loiterer. As Yifan appeared to be talking things over with management, Zhang Yuhai stuck as close to him as a shadow. Threats and inducements were all in vain; Yifan begged Boss Liu, the one in charge of the mold, to press just one sample for him as a memento. As Boss Liu handed over the sample, Zhang Yuhai snatched the mold and fled, the mold passing frantically between hands all the way to the main gate, where Shi Kangcheng and Lang Fang provided a screen for Wu Weiguo, who hopped on his bike and sped off into the sunset. The factory workers gave chase, wildly shouting, “Grab the tall, thin one! He’s the leader — ” Zhang Yuhai had long since vanished into the boundless sea of people. Management captured three hostages, but unable to get them to talk, ended up releasing them.

  At our victory celebration in Study Six, everybody’s lips flapped at the same time, each witness trying to retell the hair-raising scene from every angle. Zhang Yuhai seemed a little preoccupied, his mind elsewhere as he blew Bizet’s “Toreador Song” on his tin whistle.

  In the autumn of 1968, the workers’ propaganda team wanted to take him into custody for questioning, apparently having something to do with “an incident involving a counter-revolutionary group.” He made a precipitate decision, first holing up at a farm in Yunnan Province, then crossing the border and joining the People’s Army in Burma. Before he left, he bid farewell to his friends, saying that, in the end, there wasn’t enough room for him in the capital, and so why not go where the sky’s so high and the emperor far away, to live a life boundless and free.

  Yuhai crossed the Burmese border in the spring of 1969, and soon connected with the People’s Army. That summer, at age twenty-one, he sacrificed himself on the field of battle. He had written numerous letters to friends from Burma, copies of which circulated among the Educated Youth after his death. Only days before he was killed, he wrote letters like this: “We’re still young, the long road of our life still before us . . . not that there hasn’t been the chance to throw ourselves into the current of history, we just weren’t prepared, lacked the physical training, and when the moment came and we were swept into the current, it wasn’t of our own free will, and on and on history slipped away. . . .”

  I wrote a poem called “Starlight” that opens this way:

  As our hands parted

  you said to me: Don’t be like this,

  we’re still young

  the road before us still long.

  You turned and walked away,

  leading astray a ray of starlight.

  The starlight accompanied you,

  fading away on the horizon line. . . .

  Over the years, a tall, beautiful woman, identifying herself as “Little Fourth Girlfriend,” would visit the home of Zhang Yuhai’s mother. She’d tell the elderly lady that she still awaited his return.

  10

  In 1965, I had just entered the gates of the school when Middle No. 4 became the experimental unit for the Education Bureau of Beijing’s Socialist Education Movement, otherwise known as the Four Cleanups Movement; Upper 2 Class 2 quickly became the focus of the whole school, due to the public outing of a reactionary student, Mou Zhijing. This caused a deep psychological wound that spread like an immense shadow, forcing certain individuals into an early adulthood and isolating the class as a group.

  Mou Zhijing, however, stepped out of this shadow before anyone. An optimist by nature, quick-witted and sharp, he stood out from the crowd. As a friend once said to me, “Mou Zhijing was never one for polite conversation or empty chitchat.” He had high cheekbones, a wide nose bridge, and when others spoke, he listened intently. I had visited his home and found his family warm and harmonious: His father worked as a translator at the Railway Research Institute, his mother worked as a civil draftsman; he had one little sister, cute as a button.

  Because he had exchanged diaries with other class
mates, the words he wrote in it could be used as evidence against him and he was labeled a “filial son of the capitalist class.” This actually didn’t bother him in the least, although another matter infuriated him. “One day I returned to the classroom after kicking the ball around on the field,” he later told us. “Several students were crowded around a small-character poster pasted on the wall. I also leaned in to take a look. Someone had written, ‘Mou Zhijing is a “love-conquers-all idealist.”’ For a second I wanted to kill myself — how could I let someone trample all over my emotions like this? I had two kuai in my pocket, and I decided to gorge myself with food and drink, then kill myself. . . .”

  Given Mou Zhijing’s naturally upbeat disposition, it seemed unlikely he’d ever commit suicide, and plus, much more of greater consequence awaited him. When he first heard the couplet “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,” he became so outraged that he immediately criticized the slogan in a big-character poster, which he pasted up at the affiliated secondary school at Qinghua University. Soon after that, at a debating session at the Central Conservatory of Music, he stormed up to the podium and attacked the couplet there, too. Several Red Guards rushed to grab the microphone, then spit in his face; a number of Middle No. 4 students in the audience clambered onto the stage and exposed him as a reactionary student. A criticism session was then organized at Middle No. 4, and not only did he refuse to bend, but he came to the aid of another unjustly accused student and ended up getting a front tooth knocked out by a murderous Liu Huixuan.