We never planned on the horrible storm that would howl through every corner of the country and sweep the garden bare. That storm was the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution."
The Cultural Revolution started the Summer I turned eight years old. As a child, I saw young people die in the streets. When you first see someone die from gunfire in the streets, you are terrified. When you see a second, third, or fourth death, you get used to it. Talking with your friends about the street fighting and death you see becomes like talking about food. While bread is a necessary part of your life, violent death in the streets should not be. During the Cultural Revolution, death was a part every child's life.
In 1966, I was in a second grade class in the most prestigious elementary school in Chengdu, the capital city of China's Sichuan Province. Children in China are taught to obey authority from the first day they walk into school. As in all classrooms in China, above the chalkboard in our room there was a portrait of Mao Zedong. My second grade teacher used to tell us, "Chairman Mao is watching every day to see who is a Red child and who is not." Whenever a child acted naughty in the classroom, the teacher would ask rhetorically, "Who is watching?" We knew she meant Chairman Mao.
Schools and other social institutions constantly remind children that the new China could not exist without the Party. Authority is concretized by the creation of revolutionary martyrs and heroes. Teachers reminded us that it would be impossible for us to be sitting in such bright and peaceful classrooms without the blood of the revolutionary martyrs.
The first hint of the Revolution came at school. One morning my Chinese teacher, normally a happy, pretty young woman, walked into the classroom with a serious look on her face. Instead of picking one or two of us to recite the text assigned the day before, she said something I did not understand about Deng Tuo, Wu Han, Lia Mo-Sha. She called them "San Jia Cun" - the Three Family Village - and criticized them for being counter-revolutionaries who worked against the Party.
The teacher then divided the class into groups to rehearse a small play she had written, denouncing Deng, Wu, and Liao. My role in the play was to recite these lines:
Deng Tuo, Wu Han, Liao Mo-Sha,
Three from the same family.
Anti-Party, Anti-Chairman Mao.
The Three Family Village
Is a revisionist Black family.
***
Before we could even write politically charged characters like "revisionist" correctly, or understand their meanings, our teachers had us using the harsh political terms. We may not have known what the terms meant, but we knew they were bad words. Every time my teacher said "revisionist," she had a distasteful look on her face. When she coached me for my part in the play she constantly reminded me that I needed to speak loudly and to act with great indignation.
While we were using those words to denounce the Party's enemies in our small dramas in school, and later in the streets when we wished to taunt each other, it never occurred to us that the intellectuals, writers, and artists we were denouncing were people like our own parents - people who would later be singled out like Deng, Wu, Liao, and others, and denounced as revisionists. Lacking the ability to distinguish between good people and bad people, we were unaware we were creating "Enemies of the Party" among ourselves.
One day I came home from the rehearsal of a new play at school and asked my father what the words "revisionist" and "bourgeois" meant. He answered that they were words which should not be used carelessly. I didn't know then that my father had already been attacked as a bourgeois writer. Neither did I know that was the reason I was assigned to play a villain in the play this time.
Like many of my friends and schoolmates, the Party accused my parents of being counter-revolutionaries. And like many members of my generation, I suddenly found myself not knowing whom to believe, my parents, or the Party.
We struggled to cope with the conflict of loving our parents and, at the same time, trying to follow the Party's call to be Red Successor to the Revolution.
Our parents had ill-equipped us for this task. They had taught us to obey the Party and its representatives - our teachers and the other school authorities. It was the job of our teachers to teach us what was good and what was bad.
Like myself, almost every child I knew was a member of "Shaoxiandui" - the Young Pioneers - by the time they were ten years old. Young Pioneers wore the triangular red scarf that signified both a corner of the national flag the blood of the Revolutionary martyrs. We all raised our right hands under the red flag, making a solemn vow - to follow the Chinese Communist Party and to be a Communist Successor.
Along the way we sang the theme song of the Young Pioneers:
Are you ready?
We are always ready.
We are the Communist Children's Corps.
We will be masters of the future.
***
One evening in the Autumn of 1966, I joined a group of kids talking in the compound where I lived. A teenage boy was saying that his sister had seen a poster on a wall in the commercial center of the city. The boy was acting strange, like he should keep quiet. We asked him what the slogan said. He didn't want to talk but we pushed him and insisted that he tell us. He lowered his voice and said, "Down with Liu Shao-Qi, the Khrushchev of China." Everyone got very silent. No one responded. We looked around the circle at each other. Finally another boy asked him "are you sure the name was Liu Shao-Qi? Maybe you didn't hear your sister properly." Now that he had spoken, the teenager was confident of his information, "I'm positive," he said.
We exchanged glances again. All of a sudden, we began to discuss whether or not the slogan was counter-revolutionary. I said that photographs of Liu Shao Qi in the newspapers always showed him standing next to Chairman Mao. Another girl, much older than I, said that was why he was the Khrushchev of China. Liu Shao-Qi was the Chairman of the country at the time.
Someone suggested that we go to see, so we ran down to see the poster. It was still on the wall, and had gathered a crowd. They all seemed to be talking about whether or not Liu was a time bomb beside Chairman Mao. I didn't really understand the metaphor but I remembered the movie "Ten O'clock on National Day" which showed a KMT spy who attempted to assassinate Mao by placing a time bomb in a public place where Mao would be.
When I got home from the wall, I told my parents what I had seen. My father's first reaction was stunned silence. My mother said "you are too young to understand what you saw. You should stay at home from now on." Then my father said "you should stay a child. You have the rest of your life to be an adult and to worry about the things you don't understand today."
Despite my father's cautions, life in the outside world was far too interesting to let it slide by. My friends and I had many reasons and opportunities to think about what was happening in China.
During the late Summer and through the Fall of 1966, the newspapers were full of stories about the almost two million young people who traveled to Beijing to gather with other Red Guards in Tienanmen Square; to wait for Mao to appear over the Gate of Heavenly Peace and render his benediction. The streets of Chengdu were full of young people saying that to see Mao, and to be seen by him was recognition that you were a true son or daughter of Communism, a Red Successor to the Revolution.
One of my neighbors, Li-li was the daughter of a well-known historian. Li-li was part of the first group of Red Guards to travel to Beijing to be received by Mao. When she came home from Beijing, Li-li told her friends she was no longer afraid of anybody. Mao had bestowed his blessing on her and no one could accuse her of being Black, simply because her father had been persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
She encouraged the rest of us to go to Beijing and march for Mao. Five of us decided to go. I ran home and stuck a few clothes in my school bag and then dashed to the railway station to meet my comrades. We didn't have to worry about money because the Red Guard had already commandeered the trains in the name of the Revolution. They were happy to transport all of China's youth to Beijing to show their support for Mao.
The railway platform was the first indication that China was at war. It seemed as though everyone in town was trying to squeeze onto the train. One of my older friends said it looked like a scene from War and Peace. This started an argument about which author was best at describing revolution. I liked Hugo and another friend was partial to Gorki. Unable to get close to the train, we stood arguing, as though we were at the train station to debate literature instead of going Beijing to see Mao. We argued until our parents arrived and took us home. I never did figure out how my father found out about our plans.
Despite never getting to Beijing to see Mao, the Party's call to revolution and the newspaper photos of Mao reviewing the Red Guard in Tienanmen made us high with excitement. We had no real experience with revolution. We thought it was our turn, our moment, our chance to move away from the established order and contribute to a new China, our chance to march, fists in the air, shouting political slogans, making our loyalty to the Party visible. We were good, they - anyone who dared disagree with us - they were evil. We were the Red Guard, guarding Mao's thoughts, guarding the Party's principles, and above all guarding the Communist ideology. We felt grown up overnight. With Mao's blessing we were the masters of society, we controlled life, we determined our fate rather than the other way around.
Even though my friends and I were not yet Red Guards, we saw ourselves as the revolutionaries we had seen in movies. While the five of us who had planned to run away to Beijing enjoyed our delusion of becoming Red Guards, their leadership was already making plans that would exclude us because of our parents' backgrounds.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, anyone who wanted could join the Red Guard as long as they were middle-school age or older. Then five Red categories were set up to eliminate counter-revolutionaries and revisionists: workers, poor and lower middle peasants, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary martyrs, and revolutionary cadres who had joined the Party before 1949. Opposite to the five Red categories were five Black ones: former landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries (including former KMT), bad elements, and rightists. The five Black categories were actually seven if one included the bourgeoisie and capitalist-roaders. Youths of Black origin were not admitted by the Red Guard, unless they proved that they had renounced their class and denounced their parents.
The importance of "blood" is different for Chinese than it is in the West. In the West, family members enjoy an independence that is not found in China. For instance, when a parent commits a crime, the children do not automatically become criminals as a result. At a theoretical level, the same holds true in China but the opposite is true in reality. Once a parent is accused of a political crime, all children are equally suspect.
A dragon conceives a dragon;
And a phoenix conceives a phoenix.
A rat gives birth to a rat
While digging in the dirt.
Older youths from the now-labeled Black families, and who had joined the Red Guards at the beginning, who had traveled to Beijing, who had been received by Mao, were now being kicked out of the brigades. This was more than being asked to leave the club. Just as the Red kerchief of the Young Pioneers was a necessary part of being a Red Successor, the armband of the Red Guard was the mark of a good person. To be turned out of the Guard was to be condemned as a criminal.
These new notions of class fit neatly with Mao's earlier rhetoric. In his attempts to control intellectual elements in the Party, Mao had repeatedly drawn distinctions between good art and bad art. Good art was created by the workers, peasants, and soldiers and served their needs. Bad art was bourgeois art that which ignored the masses and was created to celebrate intellectual activity. These distinctions were used to attack the Three Family Village writers who were ventriloquating the politics of more powerful leaders of the Beijing Central Committee.
These same distinctions would now be turned against intellectuals and artists at every level of Chinese society by the Red Guard units. They provided grounds for accusation, denunciation, and persecution of anyone who was not a worker, peasant, or soldier. All the petty jealousies of the masses could now be directed, funneled into hatred, and used to destroy China's educated minority.
Such class discrimination brought about atrocities towards the Black families and the atrocities in turn fanned the flames of more class hatred.
The children of Red families were entitled to rebel, to destroy whatever and whomever they did not like in the name of the Revolution. They were encouraged to attack the Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs. The attacks were seen everywhere.
The concept of the Four Olds was broad. The lack of focus and definition made things confusing. Anything from before the 1949 Revolution could be taken as old. Anyone found in possession of goods from that period could, and frequently did, suffer horrible consequences. The Red Guard raided private houses without warning, turning the household inside out, throwing "bourgeois" possessions like jewelry, western-style clothing, women's high heels, and Qipao{1}, into the street, making everyone's shame public.
Frequently these items were dug from the closets and chests of intellectuals who otherwise wore the politically fashionable clothing of Mao jackets and the baggy, blue pants of the workers. The intellectuals hid their old clothing at home and would take it out occasionally to look at or dress in as a means of escaping the political pressures of the day, and to be themselves for a while. This proved to be a dangerous practice because when the Red Guards discovered them in possession of the outlawed items, they were accused of being unwilling to discard their traditional morals and of disapproving of the Party's attitude that clothing should reflect the demands of laboring people's lives. At first, people took to removing the shoulder pads from Western suit coats and women's dresses to make them less-conspicuous. Others cut off the high heels on their shoes. Eventually, the Red Guard's search raids were so threatening that, many families simply threw their "old" Western style clothing in the trash.
Destroying your "Olds" by yourself did not necessarily mean you would be safe. A friend of my family, a woman from a wealthy, Christian family, had burned her collection of traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy and thrown away her Western clothes. The only things she kept were a jade charm that her grandmother had given her and her mother's Bible. Her grandmother had promised her that the charm would protect her from the devil and her mother told her that the Bible would keep evil away.
Then, before the Red Guard could come to raid her house, she went to a department store to get some material to make herself a suitable, proletarian-looking outfit. There were only two kinds of cloth in the store. Both were a stiff denim, one plain and the other with a flower pattern. She purchased several yards of the flower-patterned denim and used it to make a skirt and blouse.
The next day, calm and prepared, she put on her new proletarian clothing and waited for the raid.
The sky was getting dark when seven Red Guards broke into her house. They emptied all the closets and dresser drawers, looking for something old. Angry when they didn't find anything, one grabbed her by her collar and threw her to the floor. The Red Guards then stood around her in a circle, accusing her of destroying the evidence of her guilt. One of the Guards, a girl of about 15, screamed at her, "How dare you disguise yourself as one of the proletariat? Do you think we cannot tell who you are just because you wear denim? We are Chairman Mao's Red Guards and we have very discerning eyes. Flowered denim? You are deliberately bringing shame on the proletarian class."
The woman asked the girl, "Is it wrong to be neat?" The Red Guards responded by hacking off her hair in the "Ying Yang Tou" style, where the hair on one half of the head is chopped short and the hair on the other half is shaved clean.
Before the Cultural Revolution, I thought that being abducted or arrested was something that only happened to criminals and in the movies. It never ever occurred to me that I would be witness to such things.
Those ideas changed the evening I watched my next door neighbors get abducted by the Red Guards. They were well-known revolutionary writers and had been in Yan'an in the 1930s as members of the Party. Before the Cultural Revolution, Yan'an was regarded as the cradle of the Chinese Communist Party and anyone who had been there was seen as a quintessential revolutionary. Now it counted for nothing.
It was a dusk when a truck stopped in front of our apartment building. A group of teenagers wearing Red Guard armbands kicked their way into the apartment. My friends and I were playing outside and we stopped to watch. At that time, we were still too young and innocent to be frightened enough to run away.
The sound of breaking glass and a child's screaming burst from the apartment. In a few minutes three Red Guards emerged from the apartment with a gunnysack. They dumped the contents into the courtyard - books. They set the books on fire. I noticed that one was a collection of Robert Browning's poetry.
Two of the Red Guards went back into the building while the third stood guard over the fire. The books were almost burnt to ashes when the Red Guards came back out of the apartment carrying two gunnysacks. The sacks were so heavy it took three of the young men to carry each one. As they threw the sacks into the truck I heard the sound of gagging. They jumped into the truck and sped away. No one ever saw the couple or their child again.
Shortly after I witnessed this couple being taken away, the news came that the working classes had begun forming their own groups, called the "Red Rebels." The first such group to appear was the "Association of Red Rebels" which arose in Beijing in the Winter of 1967.
Following the advent of the Association of Red Rebels, many similar organizations sprang up throughout the country with names like, "East is Red" or "Rebel to the End" or the "Mao Zedong Thought Red Guards." Just as new groups who claimed to follow Mao formed to oppose the Red Guards, these rebels were resisted by other militant organizations of workers who claimed they represented Mao's line. Almost all the factories in the country went on strike. The railway workers, after obligingly carrying millions of Red Guards to Beijing for free, now took control of all trains in the country, declaring that they would now travel free to Beijing to establish their revolutionary ties with each other. While seeing Mao was the reason for the Red Guards to come to Beijing, by the time the rebels began to travel, Mao had long discontinued the practice of appearing in front of the crowds at Tienanmen. The rebels merely used this as an excuse for personal travel at the expense of the rest of the country.
The railway workers did not limit the free travel to their own union. In their rhetoric, they extended the privilege to any other worker's group as long as it appeared that the other group was also a Rebel group supporting the thought of Mao Zedong. Ideologically, workers all belonged to the same class. In reality, anyone who enjoyed political power or who had connections with the railway workers got free travel. Everyone else stayed home.
Unlike the children of the Red Guard units, the rebels were primarily from the rural areas and were ill-educated, full-grown adults. These rebels frequently brought their entire families along when they traveled for the Revolution. When they stopped for the night, they freely took over the residences of Black families and used them as they pleased.
I remember one spring night in 1967. The whole compound where I lived was suddenly filled with shouts, "Open up. Let us in you horde of reactionaries," cried a group of rebels at our gate. They would have climbed over the walls and into the courtyard if our old doorman had not appeared to let them in. Right away someone was pounding on our door. My grandmother opened it and a handsome young man with his wife and his sister walked into our house. He said he was a newlywed and the three of them were going to Beijing for their revolutionary honeymoon. Then he looked straight at my father and called him by name. He demanded that my father cook dinner for them. He wanted to know if a reactionary writer could cook like working class people. My father was about to go into the kitchen, when the young man changed his mind and ordered my mother to cook instead. Then he demanded that my father recite some of his poetry.
My father said "I dare not. My poems have been criticized as poisonous weeds." The young man laughed coldly and said, "This is a revolutionary rebel ordering you. How dare you refuse? We know all your reactionary behavior every well. We want to criticize your poisonous writing now." Then he knocked my father to the floor and began kicking him in the stomach. Fortunately he was stopped by his wife after the third kick. We could tell from his accent that he was from Chongqing.
The next day, the courtyard of the compound was filled with dozens of young people with the same heavy Chongqing accent. One of our neighbors was a playwright. His house was occupied by seven rebels, four men and three women. In the 1930s, this playwright had been in the underground Communist Party in Chongqing. After everyone left, he told us that, with his insight as a veteran Party member, he knew that someone in our compound was a Judas who sold us out to the rebels from Chongqing.
We found our Judas soon. He was a young songwriter from the working class who was a failure at his trade. He had joined a rebel organization in Chengdu for personal revenge. He thought of himself as gifted songwriter whose failures could be traced to the bourgeois, reactionary intellectuals who suppressed him. He joined the rebels and wrote revolutionary songs. His rebellious comrades had connections with their counterparts in Chongqing and he invited them to stay with us when they traveled through Chengdu.
A few weeks later, this same rebel forced my father to write my aunt in Shanghai to "welcome" and accommodate the rebel. Our Judas was going to Shanghai with his comrades for the Revolution. Friends later told us that he forced them to do the same thing when he discovered they had relatives in other big cities where he and his friends wanted to travel.
Our revolutionary rebel songwriter was no exception. At the stage when the working class mobilized itself as rebels and were treated as the leading class again, members of other social groups began joining rebel organizations, either seeking protection, showing their moral support for the new leading classes, or simply believing Mao when he said that it was right to rebel.
During the Cultural Revolution, class loyalty and identification meant nothing. As part of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 a local writer had criticized the work of a famous poet. Early in the Revolution, he was attacked by the Red Guards. After the attack, he was told that the poet had a son who was a member of the Red Guard.
Later, when the working classes revolted and adult rebel groups began to form, this writer joined a local rebel organization. Soon a group of my friends and I saw the poet being carried home on a stretcher. His shirt was soaked in blood. His wife said his ribs had been broken in a beating by the rebels.
***
In the summer of 1967, my parents sent me to my aunt's house in the countryside to protect me from the violence in the city. My aunt's home sat on the crest of a hill, surrounded by orange trees. One morning as we were shucking corn in the yard, a young man in white shirt covered with blood came up the hill. He begged my aunt to help him. She took the young man inside the house and shut the door behind her. A few minutes later she returned to her work.
Soon, three men carrying pistols and wearing red armbands with the characters "The East is Red" came up the hill. They asked my aunt if she had seen a young man passing by. She said yes and pointed down the hill toward town, away from the direction the men had come. The rebels ran in the direction she pointed. My aunt took my hand, pulled me into the house and closed the door. "Where is that wounded man?" I asked. My aunt led me through the house, out the back door, across the yard and into a storage lean-to. In the middle of the room were two coffins. My aunt and uncle had prepared coffins for themselves, a large one for him and a smaller one for her in case anything happened to their children and someone else had to bury them.
I had never been this close to a coffin before. My aunt told me to help her open the smaller of the two. With shaking hands, we opened the coffin. There was the wounded young man. My aunt told him he should leave before the rebels returned.
***
Once they seized power the rebels began the practice of "Niu Peng," or the Cowshed - places of confinement where they kept intellectuals and artists, completely isolating them from their families. The rebels claimed that the intellectuals were confined to the Cowshed to get their old brains reformed and cleaned up. This was to be accomplished by writing confessions and studying Mao's writings - the moral maxims of the whole society.
Calling the places of confinement "Cowsheds," and locking up people was meant to dehumanize prisoners. The rebels had a term for the people they locked in their Cowsheds: "Niugui Sheshen." Literally the term means "cow ghosts and snake spirits," metaphorically it denotes monsters and demons - the forces of evil. During the Cultural Revolution this came to mean class enemies of all kinds.
The expression Cow ghosts and Snake spirits was not the rebels' creation. It came from Mao, who loved to use metaphors and fables from Chinese literature. Mao took the phrase "cow ghosts and snake spirits" from a famous novel of the Qing Dynasty, the "Travel Notes of Lao Can," written by Liu E, who used the phrase to refer to corrupt court and military officials.
During the 1957 Anti-Rightists Campaign, Mao attacked a Shanghai newspaper, "Wenhui Bao," for its bourgeois orientation. Mao said, "Only let cow ghosts and snake spirits come out of their places when it makes it easier to annihilate them, only let poisonous weeds break through the earth when it makes it more convenient to wipe them out." The term "poisonous weeds" came to be used for any writing deemed dangerous to the Revolution. The rebels picked up the phrase "cow ghosts and snake spirits" to use with regard to China's intellectuals. After the rebels began imprisoning China's intellectuals, they began to use the slogan, "Sweep Away All Cow Ghosts and Snake Spirits" to dehumanize their charges.
One afternoon, the rebels opened a local Cowshed and sent all the prisoners out to pick cotton in the fields while the prisoners' children watched them work. At noon, the rebels called a meeting at the field to criticize the intellectuals, who were lined up under the hot Sichuan sun. The rebels began shouting their criticisms at their prisoners. My friends and I were attracted by the crowd drawn by the shouting. In the field, the children of the prisoners followed the example of the rebels and began berating their own fathers. One of them, a 14 year old boy, carried a metal rod in his hand. He ordered the prisoners to stretch out their hands. One by one he slapped their palms with the rod while accusing them of being bourgeoisie because their hands were so smooth.
This boy's father received his beating in turn. When I asked the boy later how he could strike his own father he replied that he was only beating "Cow ghosts and snake spirits."
***
In the Fall of 1968 another poster appeared in Chengdu. This time it struck directly at home. Hung on the wall of the compound where I lived, the new poster said:
The Latest Directive of Chairman Mao Vast number of cadres should be transferred to do manual labor in the countryside. This is a chance for them to relearn the lessons of the masses. Apart from the aged, the weak, and the sick, all cadres should be sent to the countryside to facilitate their remolding. Cadres at their posts should be transferred in turn to the countryside to do manual labor.
I was too young to understand the meaning of Mao's directive, but not too young to know that being sent to the countryside was punishment and not reform. Before the Anti-Rightist campaign, my uncle was a manager for a large petroleum company. After he was accused of being a Rightist in 1958, he was sent to the countryside along with his wife and children. His whole family became peasants over night.
However, my friends and I were not frightened. We enjoyed day dreaming about the future. A group of us were discussing the poster, verbally picturing the countryside, thinking our parents would look like the Russian revolutionaries in Tolstoy's Resurrection, who were sent into exile in Siberia.
One boy said he had a Russian-style hat. He asked us to imagine how handsome he would be in some snowy forest, wearing the hat and his boots. I said I would definitely take my hooded red coat, a birthday gift from my father. Another boy, a little bit older than I, cut me off saying "Oh, you little girl, you just want to be like Little Red Riding Hood. How do you know where our parents will be sent? How do you know the countryside will be any better than a Cowshed?" His words caused silence. One thing we were certain of was that if the place our parents were sent was like a Cowshed, we would not be allowed to follow.
The next day we learned that the place Mao wanted to send the cadres and intellectuals was called a "Wu Qi Gan Xiao" - a May Seventh Cadre School - or Gan Xiao for short. The "May Seventh" part of the name was taken from May 7 of 1968, when the Revolutionary Committee of Heilongjiang Province, in northeastern China, sent several dozen denounced intellectuals and "capitalist roaders" to a farm in Anqing county called Liuhe May Seventh Cadre School.
Several months later, the People's Daily newspaper published an article about the experiment of reforming cadres through labor. The newspaper also published Mao's comments on the experiment in the same issue. Following the publication of Mao's directive, the practice of sending intellectuals and other cadres to Gan Xiao spread across the country.
Each social institution and working unit had its own Gan Xiao. All were located in poor, remote rural areas. Soon the fears of that wise child in the courtyard came true. Our parents were sent to places in the countryside and their children were not allowed to follow. In cases like mine, where parents did not work for the same unit, mothers and fathers were sent to different camps.
Both my father and mother were sent away with the first group of intellectuals to be sent from Chengdu. There was no consideration given for family or for health. Although my father suffered from severe asthma, he was sent to a Gan Xiao on the Vietnamese border. My mother was sent to a mountain area close to Tibet.
***
When my parents were sent to the countryside, they left me in a household that included my grandmother, who was in her 60s and not in good health, and my little brother. It fell to me to look after my brother. About a year and half after my parents were sent away, my brother came down with hepatitis. After I bought the medicine and some sugar the doctor told me that I needed to help my brother regain his health, there was too little money left to meet the rest of our needs. I told my grandmother that I needed to go to see my mother. She asked me how could I would get there without any money. I didn't know.
Fortunately I had a classmate named Li Yi whose parents had been sent to the same Gan Xiao as my mother. Her older brother had a friend who worked for the post office. She thought that he and his friends might be able to find a parcel delivery truck going to that area. A week later her brother was able to arrange a ride for us.
About a quarter to five one morning, Li Yi and I arrived at the back yard of the main post office, where many trucks were lined up to pick up parcels and mail. We waited in the cold until about 5:30 when Li Yi's brother came to us. "They're about to leave now," he said. We followed him to a truck parked by the exit gate. A few minutes later another young man appeared. He greeted to Li Yi's brother and said "Don't worry, just leave it to me." Li Yi's brother left for work and we sat beside the truck.
About twenty minutes later, two other young men appeared. Li Yi's brother's friend told them, "These two girls are my cousins. If you will give them a ride, I will repay you with some good cigarettes." The two young men agreed to give us a ride. One of them climbed into the truck and opened the back of the canvas canopy. He told Li Yi's brother's friend, "toss them up." I was too small even to reach the tailgate of the truck. Li Yi was taller, so she climbed into the truck by stepping on one of the back tires. Her brother's friend grabbed me by the waist and threw me to the young man standing in the truck, who caught me and dropped me into the back of the truck like a parcel. Before I could take a look around, the young man jumped down and closed the canopy.
Li Yi and I were in the dark. We called out to each other. I groped toward her voice. The first thing I touched was a parcel. The second thing was parcel, too. Then the truck began rolling through the city streets. Soon, Li Yi and I began to get used to the darkness, and were able to find each other.
"We are parcels now," I said to Li Yi.
"Yes," she replied, "except we have no an address on our face."
I wanted throw up because of the smell of the hot canopy and the lack of fresh air. Li Yi needed to relieve herself but the drivers apparently had no intention of stopping. In order to distract ourselves from the physical discomfort, I suggested to Li Yi that we read the parcels to see where they were sent from and where they were going. One parcel from the Shangdong Province was broken. The contents were big raw peanuts with pinkish skin. The discovery was exciting because our stomachs were empty. Li Yi started to eat some of the nuts but I stopped her.
"Why can't I have some?" she asked.
"They will find out," I said. It's like stealing,"
"No, they won't. I mean how could they?" Li Yi was upset.
"Only you and I are back here. They might think we opened the parcel deliberately."
"You are always trying to be good. You just want to be everyone's pet," Li Yi said. "I am going to eat these peanuts. I don't want to be a good girl any more."
I was about to push her hand away from the parcel when the truck suddenly stopped. One of the drivers came around the back and opened the tent from the outside. "If you want to relieve yourselves, this is your only chance," he said without looking at us. Li Yi and I looked out. The truck had stopped in the barren, dusty countryside. The only cover was a field of desiccated corn. I was reluctant to go because the two young men would also go into the field. Li Yi said "Here is your chance to make a contribution to the agriculture of the country." Then she jumped off the truck. I followed her.
The two drivers were standing by the side of the truck, urinating into a ditch, as Li Yi and I walked into the field. We were worried the drivers would take off without us so we only went a few rows into the field. When we came back to the truck, one of the drivers was searching for something among the parcels. His companion was leaning back against the truck, smoking. As we walked around to the back of the truck, the driver jumped down down from the bed, holding the broken parcel of peanuts.
With the help of the drivers, we climbed back under the canopy. After driving for what seemed an entire day and night, the truck stopped again. One driver opened the canvas, saying, "Here you are. Get off. Get Off." I asked the driver what time it was. It was six o'clock in the evening. Li Yi and I had been riding with parcels for twelve hours.
When truck sped away, Li Yi and I realized that the drivers had dropped us off in the middle of the countryside. There were no houses, no animals, and no human beings around. Only more corn fields, stretching into the mountains. I started crying. Li Yi told me to be quiet. She said that where there was a farm there was a family. We walked for a mile or so, and turned down a small road that led us to a peasant family farm. The only people home were a woman and a baby. We asked the woman if she knew if there was a Gan Xiao nearby. She said that there was one located on the mountain and that it would take us at least an hour to walk there.
After giving us some water to drink, the peasant woman led us through the fields to the foot of the mountain. When we arrived, she pointed to a path and said, "Stick to this path. At the end is the Gan Xiao, on the top of the mountain." We thanked her for her kindness and set off along the path. The sky was getting dark. I was nervous and said that I felt like we were in a horrible movie and that we might wind up captured by bandits. Li Yi shouted at me, "Be quiet. Do you want the rebels to hear you? If no one can hear you, we are safe." The air was still, the mountain was quiet but her voice echoed from the hills. I thought to myself, if there were any bandits lurking about, they knew where we were now. But I did not say a word. Li Yi's nervousness made me more scared.
The path was steep and I kept telling myself after every turn that we would soon see the Gan Xiao. Turn after turn, the Gan Xiao still did not appear. Soon the moon came out. With it appeared two iron gates and a soldier with a rifle on his shoulder.
"We arrived. We arrived," Li Yi and I shouted. We knew that was it the Gan Xiao even though there was no sign outside.
Standing before the solder, we could see into the Gan Xiao well enough to make out people's faces. I could see some of my mother's colleagues walking by in the courtyard beyond the gates. The soldier wouldn't let us in. Instead he asked us,
"Who gave you permission to come here?"
We didn't know how to respond. We had been taught to respect authority and we were afraid.
"My mother is in there," I murmured.
"We came from Chengdu," Li Yi said, as though the name of the capital city bore some mystic power which would open the gates.
The soldier was not touched, replying, "Then go back there."
We did not know what we should do, or what we could do. Li Yi and I were standing there, staring at the adults coming and going inside the courtyard, hoping we might see our parents. Finally someone recognized me. It was Uncle Cheng, one of my mother's close friends. He came to the gate and told the soldier, "I'll take care of these two."
Before I could say anything Uncle Chen led us away from the gate, saying, "I can get you into the Gan Xiao. There is a path up the back of the mountain, it is quite treacherous but the bandits are not defending that path.{2} Uncle Chen carried me and Li Yi followed, insisting she could walk. I did not understand what he meant by bandits but I did know he was taking me to see my mother.
Riding on his back, I could see the moon hanging over the trees. It looked big and yellow, as though it were painted on a stage backdrop. I have never seen a moon like that again. I remembered telling Uncle Chen that I wished the sun could be like that - so big and that pretty kind of yellow. Then I fell asleep under the slow sway of his walk.
I awoke to find myself in a single bed. I peaked out through the mosquito netting: another three single beds under mosquito nets were arranged along the wall, each with an enamel basin under it. On the other side of the room was a plain, wood bench. A few tea mugs and rice bowls sat on a rude shelf above it. I wondered where Li Yi had gone, and where the owners of the other beds were.
Suddenly I could hear voices, women approaching the door. It opened and four women came in, my mother third. As she approached me, the other three, now quiet, slipped under the mosquito nets into their beds. My mother raised the mosquito netting on the bed where I sat. She was holding a bowl of cracked corn. I looked at her, wanting to call her name, but I didn't. Something about the way she looked at me, and the silence of the other women told me that it was not time to speak. My mother looked at me for a moment without even smiling. No excitement. It was not much of a reunion after such a long separation.
"Here is your dinner," she said, handing me the bowl. "After you eat, go to sleep."
I ate the corn without speaking and tried to go to sleep, but I could not. The other women did not make a sound, no quiet chatting, not even the sound of their breathing.
My mother took a small folding chair out from under the bench, lit an oil lamp and then turned out the overhead light. She began to write. I sat up in the darkness, watching her work silently. Writing away in the dim light of the oil lamp, my mother looked like a statue except for her hand, moving across the page, page after page.
I wanted to talk to her, to touch her arm, to remind her I had come, but I did not. In our house, writing was a sacred activity. My brother and I were never allowed to disturb our parents while they were working. I remember thinking how important my mother's writing must be that night, for her to go without sleep. I got up to use the toilet, trying to attract her attention. She glanced at me for a second and turned back to her writing.
Disappointed, I decided to look over her shoulder. I could see some of the words on the page: "Self-criticism" they said. Mom immediately turned the page upside down, concealing the words.
"You won't understand," she said, as she pushed me back to the bed.
I crawled back under the netting, and sat up to watch as she returned to the bench. The words "self-criticism" kept going through my mind, helping me stay awake. I knew what self-criticism meant. It was the harshest form of punishment my parents leveled against their children. I remember having to write a self-criticism one time after my brother and I got into trouble. We had been having a contest to see who could eat the most candy, and it made us both sick. I ran and hid but my brother went to my parents. When he couldn't stand the bitterness of the medicine my mother gave him, he told them I had eaten the candy too. My mother was so upset that I had made my brother sick that she made me write a self-criticism. When I was done my father took the pages and locked them in his desk.
I never dreamed that there was someone so powerful that they could make my mother write self-criticism. My head was full of questions like, "who was my mom writing her self-criticism for?" and "who is going to punish her?" I could not answer the questions so I promised myself that I would ask my mother when she came to bed.
She did not come to bed that night.
At dawn, half asleep, someone shook me and said, "Wake up. Wake up." I opened my eyes to see my mother's face. A military officer stood behind her. I knew he was an officer by the number of pockets on his jacket. Soldiers only had two pockets, officers had four.
"Tell Li Zhengwe{3} that you are leaving here today," said my mother. I couldn't move my mouth. Mom asked me again, "Say it."
When I still made no sound, she said, "I'm sorry, this child can be very stubborn, but I will send her home today. I promise."
The political officer replied, "You had better see that she leaves. Don't forget your own problems. Otherwise ..."
My mother saw him to the door, apologizing all the way. Then she hurried over to me.
"It's not quite seven o'clock yet," said one of her roommates. "If you hurry, you can catch the bus that leaves at eleven o'clock."
I said that I wanted to leave with Li Yi because I had come with her.
"Forget Li Yi," my mother answered. "Mind your own business."
I tried everything I could to delay my departure. The later we left the Gan Xiao, the better chance I had of missing the bus and being able to stay another day.
At 7:30, the Li Zhengwe returned. My mother gathered me up and he escorted us to the gate. As we left, I gave the soldier on guard duty a nasty look. He didn't seem to notice.
I followed my mother down the mountain. At the bus terminal, my mother bought me a ticket and found that I still had an hour before the bus left. She took me to a small noodle shop and bought me a bowl of fried dumplings. Then she handed me a pair of chopsticks she had in her bag.
"I don't trust chopsticks in public places," she said. "I don't want you getting sick like your brother."
After I ate she took me back to the bus station. We were standing, waiting for the bus, when, without warning, she grabbed me by the arm and pulled my face close to hers. "Daughter, you must be obedient. Promise me."
I nodded to her even though I didn't know what she meant by obedient or obedient to whom. Now I felt guilty. I was afraid that I was disobedient for coming to visit my mother without anyone's permission.
The bus soon pulled up and the passengers, all peasants, started to pile on, their baggage an assortment of bamboo boxes and baskets, carrying everything from clothing to live chickens and ducks. Although I was from the city, I wouldn't have been surprised to see someone try to carry a live pig onto the bus. The entire time they were boarding, the driver was cursing them for making his bus dirty.
Just as I was about to board the bus my mother pulled a small package wrapped in rough paper from her bag; a half-kilo of crude, brown sugar.
"Here," she said. Your Uncle Chen gave this to me. It's not very refined so you will have to steam it before you give it to your brother. Take good care of it. Uncle Chen's hepatitis is not so bad now, but this is all he had left."
The bus began to move before I found a seat. Looking out of the window I could see my mother. I opened the window just in time to hear her shout, "Daughter, I'm sorry I let you down."
All the way home, and for weeks later, I wondered what she meant. Why was she sorry and how had she let me down? If she was sorry, Why had she had to obey the Li Zhengwei and send me home? And I was more uncertain than ever before. I wondered when my parents would come home, or if I would I ever even see them again.
***
On December 22 1968, China's youth got its marching orders when the People's Daily published Mao's latest instructions: "School graduates will be going to the countryside to get re-educated by the peasants." For most of China's youth, this was their final act in the Cultural Revolution. Some, imbued with Mao's ideology and the spirit of the times, volunteered to go to the remote areas. Others, those unfortunates whose parents didn't have the political capital to protect them, and who had no other alternatives, went because they were forced. All left to go to the poor, backward, remote areas to build the "new socialist countryside, marching to the song:
Go to the countryside,
Go to the frontiers,
To the places where the
Motherland most needs you.
Going to the countryside started with canceling one's residence registration in the city. Households in China have a residence booklet in which all the family members are registered. The place of registry is based on one's birthplace. If you happened to born in, say Shanghai, you cannot apply for residence in Beijing unless you get a job in Beijing and your new employer is powerful enough to help you transfer your domicile from Shanghai to Beijing.
A child's domicile is usually registered with their parents. For example, if you are born in the countryside you are a rural resident unless your parents are urban residents, working for the government. By the same token if you are born in the city, but your parents are peasants, you are not eligible to apply for residence in the city. For urban citizens, the residence booklet is important because it is also used by the local government to allot food and cooking oil ration coupons.
When China's youth answered Mao's call to go to the countryside - either loyal members of the Red Guard, following Mao's directives, or victims of the Red Guard, trying to escape the problems generated by their parents' black status - those youths went to the local authority to remove their name from their family residence register. Little did they know that they were sacrificing their urban domiciliary rights in the process.
In the center of Chengdu there is a statue of Chairman Mao, his right hand in the air, palm outstretched, his left hand behind his back. Around the time of the Shang-Shan Xia-Xiang campaign, there was a popular joke that involved the statue{4}. People would ask: "How long does Grandpa Mao expect us to stay in the countryside?" One person would point to Mao's outstretched arm and say "five years." Then another would point to the hand behind his back and say, "No. He has four more fingers stretched out on that hand. Nine years." That joke came true for many unfortunates who spent at least a decade in the countryside.
From end of 1968 when Mao issued his call, to the beginning of 1972, some four million youths nationwide, myself among them, were sent to the countryside and to remote frontiers, to build the new China.
When I graduated from high school, I was sent to the mountains in Sichuan. I was 17 years old. The bus ride from the city to the countryside took one entire day. At the edge of civilization, where the buses no longer traveled, I hitchhiked a ride on a tractor. For several hours I rode in the constantly joggling tractor over rocky roads, driven by an illiterate peasant.
The tractor is a symbol of power for those who live on China's agricultural communes. High social status accrues to drivers. The most important criterion for anyone who wants to operate a tractor is that they have to be known to be politically reliable. Knowing how to drive, and knowing how a tractor works, does little to recommend someone to the cadres who run the communes.
This driver knew that I was someone who was going to the countryside to be re- educated. I could see it in his eyes. I could tell that he was thinking, "Now it is my turn. I will teach this girl what the Cultural Revolution means."
When China's youths became rural residents they came to realize that they had to work the same long, hard hours as the peasants, and for the same, meager return. Only then did they realize how backward and primitive China really was. The second realization, one more difficult to accept, was that regardless of how loyal they might be to Mao and to the Party, and regardless of how sympathetic they might be with the peasants, even in the long run they were not going to reform the countryside of China. It was too huge a task even for all their young hearts and arms combined.
To begin with, the city born and raised youth had neither the tools nor the experience for the job. The pens, posters, and debates they used in their battles in the cities would not work in the countryside. The first task of a peasant is to feed himself and his family. The youths quickly realized that this would be their first need as well. All the idealistic fervor of the Red Guard units and the "Propaganda Teams for Mao Zedong Thought" faded under the relentless sun and endless fields of wheat and rice. In the face of such a tough reality, Mao's once-powerful ideology seemed vapid.
Many of these unfortunates wound up staying in the countryside for more than ten years before they finally managed to get back to the city. Many more were unable to become an urban citizens again even after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Some lost hope of returning to their urban lives and stayed, marrying peasants to survive the hardships and trying to make a life for themselves in the remote areas. Other youths died in the countryside, lost to their parents, becoming lonely rural ghosts. The 1970s quietly watched countless families become empty nests, their foundations crumbling.
Ten years after it began, the Cultural Revolution began to wind to a close when Mao Zedong died in September of 1976. It was officially called to an end when the Party cracked down on the Gang of Four less than a month later.
During the Cultural Revolution, so many were killed, so many were wounded, and far more were distorted under the same ideological slogans. The revolution was a giant burning furnace which fired our souls and our dreams, but left only dust when the fire burned down.
_________________
FOOTNOTES
{1} A Qipao is a traditional Chinese woman's dress, which dates to the Qing Dynasty and its Manchurian influence on fashion. Usually made of brocaded silk, a Qipao has a high neck, a close-fitting bodice and long slit up both sides of the skirt. Qipao were labeled part of the Four Olds during the Cultural Revolution. They were seen as symbols of feudalism.
{2} During the Cultural Revolution Mao's wife Jiang Qing approved 8 different "model revolutionary dramas" for performance in China. One of these works, Zhiqu Weihu Shan" (Conquering Fierce Tiger Mountain by Strategy) concerned a group of bandits who had established a stronghold at the top of a steep mountain. The People's Liberation Army, the heroes, capture a bandit spy in town one day. From him they learn the secret password used to enter the stronghold. Picking a heroic PLA soldier, they send him up the mountain to infiltrate the bandit group. They plan to follow him up the mountain and attack the stronghold once he is in a position to let them inside.
Unbeknownst to the PLA, the bandits have all of the passes into their territory guarded, making it impossible for the army to sneak up to the gates of the stronghold undetected. Luckily they meet a (politically reliable) hunter, who tells them, "I can take you into the bandits' stronghold. There is a path up the back of the mountain but the bandits are not defending that pass unguarded because it was so treacherous they don't think anyone can traverse it successfully. Unfortunately for the bandits, they underestimated the heroic nature of the brave PLA soldiers who overcome the obstacles of the path, enter the stronghold with the help of their infiltrator, and conquer the bandits.
Uncle Cheng's reference to bandits equates them with the soldiers running the Gan Xiao.
{3} Political Commissar.
{4} "Go to the Mountains."
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This page last updated on: Jan 8 1996