China in Ten Words (17 page)

This erstwhile totem of revolution died during my final year in primary school. He had come back home again and this time stayed for a couple of weeks, refusing to return to the countryside. As I passed his house I would often hear his father cursing him as a slacker and a good-for-nothing. In a feeble voice he would dispute this, saying he simply felt so exhausted he just didn’t have the energy to work in the fields. “You’re as lazy as a little bourgeois!”—his father’s voice went up a notch as he poured scorn on this lame excuse—“Idlers are always complaining they’ve got no energy.”

His mother felt it wouldn’t do to keep on arguing like this, nor was it practical for their son to stay on indefinitely, for it would just lead others to conclude that the problem was ideological. She did everything she could to talk him around, and finally he gave in. On the day of his departure she slipped a couple of hard-boiled eggs in his jacket pocket—they were luxury items in those days. I glimpsed him as he left. By then he was as thin as a rake and his complexion had a yellowish tinge. He shuffled off with his head bowed, the flute in his left hand, that battered old duffel bag in his right, his old sneakers on his feet. He was sobbing and kept rubbing his eyes with his left sleeve.

That was the last time I saw him on his own two feet. A few days later, out in the fields, he collapsed on the ground and ended up being carried into the county hospital on a door panel. The doctors diagnosed his condition as late-stage hepatitis and rushed him off to Shanghai, but he died in the ambulance on the way there. According to my father, when they examined him in the hospital, they found that his liver had shrunk to a minuscule size and was as hard as a stone. With his passing, the flute that had graced my childhood forever fell silent.

What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.

Two scenes linger before my eyes, one that sums up for me the beauty of the human character and another that epitomizes its ugliness.

The first of those images is that of a classmate’s father. He became a target of attack when I was in first grade; being just a low-level official in the Communist Party apparatus did not protect him from being labeled a capitalist-roader. I liked him because he recognized me as his son’s classmate and always smiled at me in the street—the only grown-up to do so, so far as I can remember. After he became a target, I never saw that heartwarming smile again, and if we ran into each other, he would quickly look away. During his months on the blacklist he must have been subjected to all kinds of mistreatment; every time I saw him, his face was battered and bruised. My classmate, once a cheerful, carefree boy, now had terror in his eyes, and during recess he would stand by himself in a corner as the rest of us played. One morning he arrived at school crying and sobbing, and as he stood waiting for the bell to ring, his whole body shook and he buried his face in his hands. His father, we soon learned, had drowned himself in a well. The culmination of many weeks of suffering, his suicide was surely not an impetuous act on his part, but he had taken great care to conceal his intentions from his loved ones. Torn between staying and leaving, in the end he elected death; in the early hours of the morning he rose silently, bade a soundless farewell to his sleeping wife and son, then opened the door and took that leap into another world. I had seen him in the street just a few hours before. Blood was trickling down his forehead, and he was walking with a limp. In the failing light of that late afternoon, his right hand rested on his son’s scrawny shoulders, and as he talked to the boy, he wore a smile of seeming nonchalance. Many years later, as I wrote
Brothers
at my home in Beijing, I was always haunted by that spectacle of a father walking with his son on the last evening of his life. It was out of that indelible image, perhaps, that Song Fanping emerged to live and die in the pages of my book.
^‡

The ugliness I observed in second grade. As we children ran around during recess, our teachers would stand in the playground in clusters of two or three, exchanging a few words while they kept a watchful eye on us. A couple of the second-grade women teachers would regularly stand next to each other and chatter away jovially. Often I would hear them cackling over some amusing story and I would throw them an envious glance, for it seemed to me they had a special rapport, like sisters who share all their inner thoughts. One morning, however, I arrived at school early, before anybody else had arrived in the playground. I went into the classroom to find one of the teachers already at her desk, correcting homework. Looking up, she beckoned me conspiratorially and told me with unmistakable excitement and relish that her colleague was the daughter of a landlord—something the school had just learned, after sending someone to her hometown to conduct inquiries—and now she was in custody and facing investigation. When I realized how this teacher was savoring the other’s downfall, I was struck with horror, for all along I had been so sure they were best friends. Later I would always shudder when I saw teachers in the playground engaged in seemingly intimate conversation. Even the gruesome street battles didn’t frighten me as much as that false veneer of camaraderie.

What was revolution? In my early years I had a living example before me, in the shape of my brother. Hua Xu was born, it seemed, for revolutionary agitation; “To rebel is justified” could have been his blood type. When still in second grade, he performed a revolutionary feat that shocked the whole school. His grade teacher had criticized him, in harsh language that he found offensive, for disrupting class. He rose to his feet, picked up his chair, and carried it to the side of the rostrum where the teacher was standing. As she watched in bewilderment, he jumped up on the chair and from this commanding height smashed his fist into the side of her head, just above her ear. Though just nine years old, he managed to deliver a knockout punch; the next thing the teacher knew, she was lying in a hospital bed.

Once he entered middle school, Hua Xu’s revolutionary nature found even richer soil to till. The testimony of his language-and-literature teacher left a deep impression on me: when pushed beyond her limits, she took the step of visiting us at home and delivering to my parents a long list of grievances, interspersed with bouts of tears. To catalog all her charges took her quite some time, and one particular episode she recounted has always stayed in my mind.

During class one day that winter, Hua Xu had taken off his sneakers and laid them on the windowsill to dry out in the sun. His nylon socks gave off a rank stench, all the more intrusive because he sat in the front row and put his feet on the top of his desk. As the teacher introduced the lesson, she had altogether too close an encounter with the stink emanating from my brother’s direction. She told him to put his shoes on. No, he couldn’t do that, he said; his footwear required a further period of exposure to the sun. So saying, he wiggled his toes ostentatiously, the better to distribute his foot odor. Goaded beyond endurance, the teacher stormed over, picked up the shoes, and chucked them out the window. But Hua Xu knew how to counter that: he jumped onto his desk, and from there onto the rostrum, where he grabbed the teacher’s notes, then ran over to the window and tossed them out, too. Amid the cheers of his classmates he then jumped out the window and climbed back in again, sneakers in hand. Returning his shoes to their preferred location, he plopped himself down in his chair and put his feet back on his desk. Finally, like a conductor leading an orchestra, he waved his hands in the air to direct his classmates’ applause and watched in triumph as the teacher shuffled dejectedly out of the classroom. She could not bring herself to hop out and back in the window as my brother had done, so was forced to make a long detour around the building to retrieve her notes. As she bent down to pick them up off the ground, she noticed her pupils’ faces glued to the windows and heard a gloating chorus of mockery.

My father was incensed. No sooner did he see the teacher out the door than he sprang into action, grabbing a stool by its leg and hurling it at Hua Xu, who dodged to one side and deflected the blow. My mother tried desperately to put herself between them. “I can’t believe these outrageous things you’ve done!” my father cried.

Hua Xu was unabashed. “Revolution—that’s what I’ve done.”

At last my father managed to shove my mother aside. He charged, fists raised. Hua Xu turned tail and fled, but once he had reached a place of relative safety, he called back defiantly: “Revolution—that’s what I’ve done!”

It made me hanker for revolution. Cultural Revolution or not, we primary school pupils were afraid of our teachers. If we talked or distracted others in class or if we got into a fight, they would often force us to write self-criticisms. I must have written more self-criticisms in primary school than I did compositions. And our teachers would then paste them up on the classroom walls, making us lose a lot of face. The exploits of Hua Xu and the other older boys gave us a sense that we wouldn’t have to write any more self-criticisms once we got into middle school, for there it was not the pupils who were afraid of the teachers but the other way around. Once we got into middle school, we thought, misbehavior had a chance of gaining legitimacy as revolutionary action.

So it was that in the early summer of 1972 we crossed the new concrete bridge and entered the grounds of Haiyan Secondary School. Some students were playing basketball, and others lay sprawled on the grass, chatting away. As we passed the classroom buildings, we saw students sitting on almost all the windowsills. One of them beckoned us—a boy from our alley who was a year older than us. “Just got out of class, did you?” we asked.

He shook his head. “No, we’re in the middle of class.” He leaned out, pulled each of us up through the window, and introduced us to his neighbors.

We’d never seen anything like this. The classroom was buzzing with noise, with some pupils sitting on desks, others walking back and forth, and a couple locked in a furious argument, seemingly about to come to blows. A teacher stood on the rostrum, writing some physics problems on the blackboard. As he wrote, he explained some point or other, but not one of his pupils seemed to be listening.

This scene left us dumbfounded. We had to be missing something. We pointed at the teacher. “Who’s he talking to?” we asked our friend.

“He’s talking to himself.”

We snickered. “You’re not afraid of him?”

“Afraid of him?” He chuckled. “This is middle school, you know—it’s not your primary school.”

As he spoke, he rummaged around in the desk until he found a piece of chalk. He raised his arm and let fly. The teacher saw it coming and ducked out of the way, then carried on explaining the laws of physics, as though it was perfectly normal for pupils to target him for missile practice.

What is revolution? Now at last we knew.

*
geming

†
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), p. 28.

‡
In Yu Hua’s most recent novel,
Brothers
, Song Fanping is father and stepfather to the main characters, Song Gang and Baldy Li.

disparity

I
t’s only a short step from cowardice to bravery—that’s something I learned from a teenager many years ago. This was back in the mid-1970s, when amid many dreary strictures we reached the final stages of the Cultural Revolution. He was one of my high school classmates, and today he still lives in the town where we grew up; unable to hold down a job, he depends on his father’s meager pension to make ends meet. The boy I remember had fine, delicate features marred by protruding teeth; with his puny, underfed frame, he would tag along in the rearguard as our gang roamed the streets.

We were eager for any kind of trouble in those days, picking fights with others our age, sometimes even plucking up courage to take on boys a good few inches taller than we were. When the action was at its thickest, this classmate would make sure he kept out of harm’s way, looking on from a safe distance—not running away but not taking part in hostilities either. But one day he was transformed into a fearless hero, and thereafter he was always the first to throw himself into a fight and the last to beat a retreat.

Our gang had been bested that day by a pack of older youths, and we ended up fleeing from them in terror, clutching our heads. He raced home but soon came running back, kitchen cleaver in hand. On the way he paused for a moment and slashed his cheek with the blade. As blood poured from the wound, he daubed it freely over his face like warpaint and then, screaming at the top of his lungs, charged toward our adversaries.

They who had been chasing us so gleefully now found themselves confronted by a daredevil brandishing a kitchen cleaver, with blood streaming down his face. “The weak fear the strong,” the Chinese saying goes, “the strong fear the violent, and the violent fear the reckless.” Our vanquishers turned tail and fled, with the boy hot in pursuit, shouting, “I’ll teach you who’s boss now!”

The rest of us, who had been scurrying away in panic minutes earlier, took courage from his truculent display. We regrouped and charged after him, shouting, “We’ll teach you who’s boss now!” As we raced through the streets, in no time at all we were dripping with sweat, and in order to maintain speed and avoid getting winded, we soon abbreviated our battle cry to the snappier “Who’s boss?”

That afternoon news of our exploit swept through the whole town, earning us celebrity as the Who’s Boss Gang. After that, other young hooligans would greet us with obsequious smiles and the older boys would give us a wide berth. My classmate, having won our heartfelt respect, no longer tagged along behind us—overnight he had become the leader of the pack.

Why the sudden transformation? The reason was simple, so simple that today it hardly seems credible. One day his parents had gotten into an argument with the neighbors over some trivial matter, suspecting them of pinching their coal briquettes or something of the kind. The argument escalated into a full-blown fight, in which the boy too became involved. He chose to strike out at the weakest possible adversary he could find, the neighbors’ pretty daughter, landing a punch right on her plump little breasts. That was all it took to make him a new man. Later he waved the palm of his hand before our envious eyes and recounted how his four happy fingers had—separated only by her blouse—established firm contact with her shapely bosom. His thumb, he said, had missed out on the treat, but his fingers had felt a heart-stopping softness.

That momentary feeling of ecstasy convinced my classmate that he had already lived as long as he needed to. “I’ve had a feel of a girl’s tits! I can die now,” we often heard him say, a blissful smile on his face.

It was the conviction that he could now die without regrets that inspired this timid creature to feats of extraordinary daring. That’s what our adolescence was like: momentary contact with a girl’s breasts was a life-changing catalyst. Growing up in an era of extremes, we might be afraid of nothing when we were in the middle of a street fight, but we would tremble at the thought of a female body.

A second high school classmate—whose identity remains a mystery to this day—once scrawled on the blackboard the words “In love,” an expression we understood intuitively, although we had never once used it. As the news spread, students in the other three first-year classes rushed over to view the inflammatory graffiti, although they were careful to wear sternly censorious expressions and shout “Let’s catch the hooligan!” as they approached the classroom. Once in front of the blackboard, they gawked in awestruck silence, unable to tear themselves away. I myself had never seen these two words together, for the phrase had long disappeared from popular usage, and to be suddenly confronted by it made the blood flow hot in my veins.

The two crudely written characters were allowed to remain on the blackboard for a good ten days, as incriminating evidence, because the school’s Revolutionary Committee needed to track down the hooligan who had written them. First they had all the boys in our grade hand in their composition books so they could compare the handwriting. When this failed to produce a suspect, they scrutinized the composition books of all the girls, with an equal lack of success. The scope of the search was then extended to the second-years, again to no avail. In the end nothing came of it, and the Revolutionary Committee chairman had personally to purge the crime scene of the offensive language. For me this came as a big blow, since I had got into the habit of stopping to admire “In love” every time I went past, thereby slaking my thirst for romance. With its disappearance, even this vicarious satisfaction was impossible.

The anonymous classmate who wrote these words on the blackboard must surely have known that he was committing hooliganism, and so, we concluded, he must deliberately have written the characters in such a sloppy hand so that he could escape detection and get away scot-free. A popular film at the time had a line that went, “No matter how sly the fox, he’s no match for the wily old hunter.” After the “In love” episode, a new version of this line began to circulate among us: “No matter how wily the hunter, he’s no match for the sly little fox.”

My son has told me that in his middle school biology class the teacher directed the girls to sit on the boys’ laps and then began to explain the physical differences between the sexes and the principles of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and so on. After he had finished, one of the students raised his hand and asked, “Sir, is there a lab class, too?”

Thirty years ago, however, boys and girls in high school did not talk to one another. They would have loved to, of course, but did not dare. Even if they had a crush on a member of the opposite sex, the most they could do would be to cast furtive glances at them. The boldest boys might quietly slip notes to girls, but they wouldn’t dare use words that clearly expressed love and instead employed elaborate circumlocutions, saying they wanted to give them an eraser or a pencil. The recipient would understand at once what game they were playing and react with unease, even fear. If the note was ever exposed to public view, the girl would feel deeply ashamed, as though she had done something improper.

Today high school students have no inhibitions about relationships, and the issue of teenage romance is discussed openly in society at large. In one video clip I have seen posted on the Internet, a boy sits on a school desk during recess and leans over to hug a girl sitting in the chair next to him. While classmates walk back and forth and talk about this and that, the couple kiss and cuddle as though they have the whole room to themselves. In a second clip, a boy falls to his knees in a school corridor and offers a bouquet of flowers to a girl. She brushes him aside and nips into the girls’ bathroom. The boy hesitates for a second, then follows her into the bathroom, flowers in hand. These days pregnancies among high school girls have become so common they are no longer controversial, but it is still startling to find that some teenage girls actually show up for abortions in their school uniforms. I read that in one case the girl was escorted to the hospital by no fewer than four schoolboys. When the doctor said she needed a relative’s signature, all four rushed forward.

W
hat has made us move from one extreme to the other? Countless answers could probably be offered, but I doubt that such a cascade of responses will really provide a clear explanation. One point, however, is clear: when society undergoes a drastic shift, an extremely repressed era soon becomes a very lax one. It’s like being on a swing: the higher you soar on one side, the higher you rise on the other.

China’s high-speed economic growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence. A quick jump seems to be all it took to cross a span of thirty years.

Just look at China today: the urban high-rises shooting up like forests under a gray and murky sky; the thick mesh of expressways, far outnumbering our rivers; the dazzling array of merchandise in shopping centers and supermarkets; the endless lines of traffic and pedestrians in the streets; the constant glitter of advertisements and neon signs; the nightclubs and massage parlors, beauty salons and foot-washing joints, lining every block; not to mention the luxury restaurants three or four floors high, each floor the size of an auditorium, rimmed on all sides by sumptuous private rooms, two or three thousand people all wining and dining, shiny-faced with satisfaction.

But just thirty years ago, before we took that leap, we saw no high-rises, apart from one or two in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai; we had no concept of expressways or advertisements; we had very few stores, and very little to buy in the stores we did have. We seemed to have nothing then, though we did have a blue sky.

Those were the days of the rationing system, when men were restricted to coupons for just twenty-seven pounds of grain per month and women to twenty-five, along with coupons for half a pound of meat and two ounces of oil per person. When you bought grain, you needed to hand over grain coupons along with your cash, just as when you bought pork and vegetable oil, you needed to pay in cash, meat coupons, and oil coupons. On top of that there were cotton coupons, which we combined with cash to buy cotton in the fabric shop, then went to the tailor’s to get measured and fitted for a jacket or pants—although most people would try to save money by making their own clothes. There were no clothing factories then, and stores didn’t sell ready-made clothes. If you had a sewing machine in your house, you would be the undying envy of all your neighbors.

In managing the household budget, we had to run the tightest of ships, restricting ourselves to nine ounces of rice a day, a few slices of pork a week, and ten drops of oil with each stir-fry, for only in that way could we avoid overspending our monthly allotment. In the world in which my generation grew up, we neither had enough to eat nor so little to eat that we would die of hunger. When we think back to what was best about our childhoods, we tend to reminisce about remarkably similar things, all involving the eating of some kind of treat; apart from that, we have very few memories to cherish.

We townsfolk seldom had anything left over, even if we reduced consumption to a minimum. For men it was practically impossible to fully satisfy one’s appetite on twenty-seven pounds of grain a month; but women could typically manage with a little less than their ration, so they would use their leftover coupons to supplement the diets of their husbands or brothers. Oil coupons and meat coupons likewise failed to meet one’s needs, so people would often buy coupons on the side to help maintain life and limb.

Peasants in my home district tended to have extra oil coupons in hand, for when they harvested rapeseed and delivered it to state-owned oil-pressing plants, the coupons would be their compensation. For them it was an important source of supplementary income. If they needed money to pay for medical treatment or a wedding, cash-strapped peasants would come into town and quietly sell their surplus coupons. In that era of public ownership, this was considered speculation and profiteering.

Inspired with a crusading zeal, some high school classmates and I formed a team of vigilantes to crack down on such activities. Today, I suppose, we would be described as volunteers, but volunteers at least can expect some free meals, and the only meal we got was if we opened our mouths wide and took a gulp of the raw winter wind. We would rouse ourselves at four in the morning to lie in ambush near the marketplace, hiding at street corners or behind utility poles, like hunting dogs poised for action. If we found someone selling oil coupons on the sly, we would leap out at him, confiscate his coupons, and march him off in triumph to the anti-speculation office.

We got a kick out of bullying those weaker than ourselves, believing too that we were performing a public service. Although we certainly had victories to our credit, our detainees tended to be peasants well past their prime, and the oil coupons we seized from them seldom amounted to very much. What’s more, the peasants never dared resist, for they themselves were convinced they were doing something wrong, and so their only reaction was to weep helplessly as we snatched away their coupons.