City Gate, Open Up

by Bei Dao

  14

  As summer turned to fall in 1968, a secret organization known as the Red Guard 6514 Unit emerged in Beijing, stirring up trouble like a god or a ghost, posting propaganda banners everywhere like: “Ferret Out and Suppress Beijing Secondary Schools’ Cultural Revolutionary Little Reptile Li Zhongqi!” “Those Who Suppress the Student Movement Will Come to a Bad End!” “The Principles of the Commune Will Last Forever!” Around the same time, the mimeographed tabloid newspaper Principles also circulated through the city.

  In fact, this was all the work of five or six students from our class. The unit number, smacking of empty bravado, could be decoded with ease: Middle No. 4 Upper 1 Class 5 Study 6, reversed to make the 6514 Unit.

  In the spring of 1968, because of ambiguous messages coming out of the Central Committee and the involvement of so many university factional organizations, conflicts escalated between the April Third Faction and the April Fourth Faction. The workers’ propaganda team and the People’s Liberation Army’s thought-propaganda team delete entered the school gates together to contain the situation, setting up a Revolutionary Committee. The one in charge of implementing this secondary school martial law was the deputy commander of the Beijing Garrison, Li Zhongqi.

  As the Cultural Revolution came to a swift and bewildering close, we all felt somewhat betrayed. In the meantime, from behind the fray of the two clashing factions, the Old Guard put forth the most eloquent challenge, having nothing to do with any “twenty years later we’ll see who’s won or loss”: “Why don’t you wield the brush and we wield the guns and then we’ll see who owns this land under heaven in times to come?”

  Whether along the campus’s little paths or in the spaces between words, the committee cast its arrogant shadow everywhere. It originated from the elitism of the “blood lineage” — transgressing a history of arrogance, never mind youth and ignorance — the crux of the problem being their utter lack of self-reflection, never pausing to examine their own conscience (save for the few exceptions). This grew into a kind of self-inflicted wound, a wound that more than forty years later still festers — the line between “commoners” and “nobility” running like a scar across history, still visible to this day.

  The Red Guard 6514 Unit marched on, not only making life difficult for a certain General Li Zhongqi but leaving unspoken meanings on the stage of official history, so that what originally seemed to be an inevitable, logical narrative progression became riddled with holes. By day we worked the wax-coated printing plates and brushed slogans, and at midnight dispatched our troops, even pasting up slogans on the wall that faced Garrison Headquarters.

  One time we rode a flatbed tricycle in the middle of the night along West Chang’an Avenue and turned into the depths of an alley to Beijing Middle No. 6, not far from Tiananmen Gate. As we finished pasting up some slogans and an issue of Principles onto the brick wall outside the school’s main entrance, ten or more boys suddenly rushed out from the campus with baseball bats and spring locks in their hands, while the only weapons we had consisted of a few brooms and metal buckets. Standing in a line face-to-face, bodies almost glued together, each side could hear the other side’s breathing. My heartbeat accelerated, blood bubbled upward, brain blanked out; I could see my own bloodthirsty desire in the eyes I gazed into, a manifestation of man’s primal instincts that could be traced back to our hunter-and-warrior ancestors and which in instances like this could take complete control over us.

  We stood frozen in a deadlock; the seconds felt like the accumulation of a century. Then our side retreated a step, then another, insults traded as we stepped, the pace of our withdrawal needing proper assurance, neither too fast nor too slow, or face certain doom. We walked out of the alley onto Chang’an Avenue. The autumn wind picked up; I shuddered uncontrollably.

  Principles lasted for three issues, then died of natural causes, hardly leaving a mark upon the world save in our hearts — we grew up overnight, daring to challenge the authoritarian powers. And then a moment later, just after the curtain had been raised, every principle, caught in the wave of the Down to the Countryside Movement, needed to be revised, changed, or stretched.

  15

  In the winter of 1968, a group of ten of us, including Teacher Tian Yong, made the trip to Baiyangdian in Anxin County, Hebei Province to participate in the Education Revolution Expedition. The fervor of the Down to the Countryside Movement engulfing the whole nation was simply unfathomable, each one of us caught in the middle of it as the target of revolutionary education. Our journey was infused with the epoch’s madness, bearing its frenzied traces.

  Soon we became embroiled in an epic struggle, as both factions — the provincial military command and the Thirty-Eighth Army Division — backed separate skirmishes till the sky darkened and the land dimmed, the conflagration spreading to Baiyangdian; indeed, this had been the base of operations for Japanese resistance and so the peasants possessed an abundance of real combat experience.

  Just as we were settling into the county committee’s hostel, we received notification that seven people involved in a battle to take control of the county seat had been killed, and a memorial service would be held. As we had no choice but to attend, we made a garland of flowers and brushed Lu Xun’s elegiac couplet — “In enduring the sight of friends becoming new ghosts / Fury seeks a little verse in a thicket of swords” — onto an enormous banner and hung it horizontally across the main thoroughfare in town. A loudspeaker broadcast funeral music. We stopped by the tent where the corpses were being held and bowed three times to the dead. That was the first time I had seen a dead body in real life — the dead consisted of both males and females, their waxy yellow skin against the sunlight made them look almost translucent, reminding me of a shadow play. But the most terrifying thing was the stench, which forced each of us into a personal struggle for breath.

  As representatives from Beijing, we were naturally accepted as elite members of “Chairman Mao’s appointed family,” the head of the rebel faction and the families of the deceased repeatedly imploring us to stay as special guests for the Flowing Water Banquet. We refused with diplomatic politeness and returned to the county committee hostel, where we succumbed to fits of vomiting, skipped dinner, and continued to heave and groan under the murky lamplight.

  For safety reasons, our survey started with the middle schools outside the city gates. Those rural children who studied so hard seemed superhuman: rising early and working late, staying up all night by the burning light of an oil lamp, no downtime for play, no recreations, their food and shelter situation extremely impoverished. They dreamed of moving to the city to study at a university, thus altering their fate of being bound to the soil. Because of the limited number of spots for enrollment, however, these children had to exceed the standard Beijing student’s exam score by a large margin to even have a chance at acceptance. This came as a huge shock to us — held to this standard, half of Beijing Middle No. 4 wouldn’t test into college. Such societal injustices were far beyond anything we could imagine.

  The fire signals appeared again, as the opposition began to attack the county seat. The sound of gunfire resumed mostly at night, the whistling of bullets making it difficult to sleep. At any moment, the county seat could fall, turning the hostel into a primary target. With a straw rope tied around his waist, Teacher Tianyong leaped up, determined to sneak over to the hostel gate and investigate the situation, see if the gunfire would soon be upon us. We watched him duck for cover, then slowly crawl forward. When he came back, he said that the elderly guard at the hostel gate had listened for gunfire, then yawned, saying that the enemy was still far away, best to go to sleep without delay.

  Holed up in the county hostel for more than ten days, rumors swirled around us; we had no idea what was really happening in the world outside. Under military pressure, both sides finally sat down to negotiate. We took the first bus out to Baoding, fleeing the besieged city.

 
Not long after we returned to Beijing, Spring Festival was upon us. At a classmate’s party, dishes and cups scattered about, we got drunk and raised our voices in song with bitter cries. We took turns writing fashionable old-style poems in antiphonal response, the passing moment steeped in our emotions, brimming over with the sorrow of parting! The Beijing train station served as our last classroom, for a new lesson in saying good-bye.

  Mother at the Henan May Seventh Cadre School, 1971

  Father reading Lu Xun at the May Seventh Cadre

  School dormitory in Hubei, 1971

  With Father at the May Seventh

  Cadre School in Hubei, 1970

  Cultural Revolution struggle session at Beijing Middle No. 4

  Family photo at the Temple of Heaven, 1972

  Father with relatives after returning to the capital from the May Seventh Cadre School (from the left: Uncle Han Yaohui, Uncle Zhao Yinian, Uncle Zhao Yannian, Father)

  The Great Linkup

  1

  In the middle of September 1966, six of us students — Zhang Qian, Pan Zongfu, Yang Xiaoyun, Zhang Youzhu, Xu Jinbo, and myself — stepped onto a southbound train.

  A few weeks before, beginning on August 18, Chairman Mao had granted the Red Guards eight consecutive audiences at Tiananmen Gate, leading to the Cultural Revolution’s new tidal wave — the Great Linkup. The CPC Central Committee directive supported students from all parts of the country to come to Beijing, while also encouraging Beijing students to travel all over China, in order to exchange revolutionary experiences — transportation and living expenses would be subsidized by the state. Trains and public transit throughout the country became free for secondary school and university students, and reception tables were quickly set up at each station to handle the logistics of food and shelter. While the Old Red Guards were given priority, political records needed to be checked (i.e., family background) in order to leave. But Chairman Mao pushed the waves and aided the ripples, and the sluice gate swiftly opened.

  Xu Jinbo procured a standard, blank letter of introduction from such and such Red Guard organization, and summoned us children of ordinary civilians to fill in our names, intending to use the blanks on the page as proof of our own blank innocence. With the letter in hand, we lined up at the Dongdan Railway Station ticket office and ended up receiving six free tickets.

  It was my first journey far from home, away from my parents. Baggage was simple — besides a small schoolbag stuffed with extra clothes, just the little wooden case I had made with Mao’s words brushed on it in red paint and the four volumes of his writings packed inside it.

  We transferred at Baoji City in Shaanxi. Chilly night; thick billows of smoke puffed out of the locomotive, blocking the platform lights. By the time we reached Chengdu it was already past midnight. The warm, moist southern air washed over our faces, flowing slowly on as the train gently rocked forward to a stop. The Red Guards working the reception table in the railway station plaza assigned us to Middle No. 14. Upon learning that we were coming from Beijing, the teachers and students in charge of reception were particularly hospitable, and even prepared a midnight snack for us — sautéed shredded bamboo shoots with a huge vat of rice. Males and females slept in separate classrooms; we arranged our beds on the floor, desks and chairs piled up to the side. Jittery with excitement, we whispered secretly to each other in the darkness, until complaints silenced us and we put our heads down to sleep.

  The next morning, we checked in at the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee Headquarters. Big-character posters everywhere, shaking heaven and earth, pointed accusingly at the southwest region’s first in command, Li Jingquan, who was still the party committee secretary of Sichuan. We acted like students studying abroad, looking around and copying down every line we saw. Big-character posters divulged all sorts of astonishing insider information. For example, in this heavenly prefecture of the nation, several million people had starved to death during the Difficult Period of the three-year famine, and Li Jingquan’s infamous remarks about it had spread to households near and far: “China is so vast — what dynasty, what epoch, has there ever been in which people haven’t died from hunger?” There were also those cases of corruption that, like pornographic novels, made faces heat up and hearts leap.

  About one hundred li (fifty kilometers) from Chengdu, Anren Ancient Town in Dayi County became a hot spot during the Great Linkup, due to the landlord Liu Wencai’s infamous feudal manor and Rent-Collection Courtyard, where he had supposedly exploited peasant farmers during the Republican period. In 1965, teachers and students from the sculpture department at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute teamed up with local artisans to create a series of life-size clay sculptures in the Rent-Collection Courtyard, depicting the plight of the peasants in the hands of the landlord. The exhibit became a nationwide sensation, and even traveled to the Beijing Art Museum where schools from all over the area organized field trips to see it. I still remember writing about it for a class assignment at the time.

  There were actually a number of grand residences with connecting courtyards hidden behind walls in Anren Ancient Town, the Liu Wencai Feudal Manor merely one of them. We slogged our way through a constant swarm of people — no will of our own, no place to rest. Shadows stretched west to the sun, the crowds gradually thinned; then a sudden whiff of a rare fragrance we traced to a deep-fried duck stall by the roadside, one mao five for a piece. After we each bought a portion, we stored it carefully in the plastic bag where we kept our steamed rolls, gnawing small bits of it over time, until only the fragments of duck bone remained. On the way back to the railway station, Pan Zongfu and I each took a steamed roll and dipped it into the residual oily duck juice, savoring each bite with prodigal praise, reaching for the most superlative adjective under heaven, “Oh, so motherfucking good!” Even if it was pestilent duck, it left a rich, lingering aftertaste for the rest of our lives.

  Zhang Youzhu — tall, strong as a horse — played center on our basketball team. Whenever anyone brought up his family’s brand of sesame-paste sweet cakes, his eyebrows danced with delight. I actually called him Sesame-Paste Sweet Cake. From the moment we arrived in Chengdu, he contracted diarrhea and couldn’t get out of bed; he soon returned to Beijing, exiting in the middle of the show. I changed his nickname to Ah Li Li (“Ah Dysentery”), not only because it sounded good but for its piercingly exotic yet familiar ring.

  Arriving in Chongqing, we stayed at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law at the foot of Gele (“Clarion”) Mountain, the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery only a short walk away. The compound once served as the headquarters of the Kuomintang Military Bureau and Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization, a jointly run intelligence agency that operated against Japan. All of us had read Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s coauthored novel Red Crag early on in elementary school: That gruesome tale of prison torture and espionage, so terrifyingly vivid, was set here in the cooperative’s prisons, where the two writers had been held as underground communists. The ancient trees of Gele Mountain still towered to the skies, clouds and mist floating by — just another ordinary, immortal paradise.

  2

  Chongqing, Chaotianmen (“Gate to Heaven”) Dock. The horn blared three times; the ship unmoored and set off; the deck quaked. We were put in a third-class berth with six bunks. Tickets were difficult to obtain and the number of passengers far exceeded the number of bunks, so we slept two per bed, a much more comfortable setup, nevertheless, than sitting on a train — the ride smooth and silent, air fresh as can be. Gazing at the steep cliffs from the deck, I couldn’t help but recall a Li Bai poem I had read in school: “Apes on both shores howl without end / The boat glides lightly by ten thousand hills.” Any apes had long vanished, and the overloaded boat seemed in danger of capsizing at any moment. The little speaker in each cabin broadcast quotations and revolutionary songs interspers
ed with a reminder repeated over and over again for passengers not to all crowd onto one side of the boat when admiring the scenery. It must’ve been past midnight when we passed the Three Gorges, our sleep so deep that the mythic beauty of the landscape didn’t leave a single trace behind in our dreams.

  Some students from the Beijing University of Technology shared the cabin with us — one guy and three girls. The guy, Xu Rongzheng, was nicknamed Old “Pia”; I couldn’t verify the word for “Pia” but I thought it had something to with his enlarged lower jaw (scientifically known as “cherubism”), while also suggesting the smack of falling flat on the face: from “pia” to “pia,” the latter onomatopoetic and the former homographic (for his condition). Our company also included three male students from the Fisheries College at Jimei University in Xiamen, one of them, Weng Qihui, guileless and taciturn, I connected with straightaway.

  Three days aboard ship and my two new friends and I mingled easily, getting to know one another well — we decided to stick together for the rest of our travels. Old Pia — intelligent, capable, always putting service before self — became our natural leader. He spread out a map and marked the trail we would blaze: landfall at Wuhan, and after a few days there of rest and recuperation, pass through Zhuzhou to Shaoshan, and onward to Guangzhou.

  We stayed at a school in the Hankou section of Wuhan, where the mouth of the Han River opens into the Yangzi. I went to visit Uncle Da Jiu, my mother’s eldest brother. He was born in the Huangpu district of Guangzhou, and graduated from Jinling University; after the July Seventh Incident in 1937 that sparked another war with Japan, he joined the guerrilla fighters in Hubei, and eventually was appointed the county magistrate of Yingcheng, while still serving as a commanding officer in the guerrilla movement. By the time the Cultural Revolution launched, he had become the deputy mayor of Wuhan. As an activist for democracy, however, he didn’t wield any real power, and so after the first big, surging wave of the revolution, he emerged as a survivor.