God Is Red (14 page)

Liao:
What happened after the Cultural Revolution was over?

Zhang:
Before 1982 nobody dared worship publicly. If we were caught, we would have to go through the same public denunciation meetings. Gradually, Christianity spread secretly among villages. In the past couple of years, the policy loosened up and there has been a revival. People flocked to God in droves, village after village. In the old days, people were fervent supporters of Communism. Nobody believes in that now. Even some Communist Party members have come to worship God and confess their sins. Some even donated money to help repair our church. In the past, I have gone through all sorts of sufferings. Each time I was plunged into despair, I prayed and sought guidance from the Lord. I lived through fifty years of suffering.

Throughout my whole life, I passed four tests. The first one came when I was eight. I was herding goats on a warm autumn day and fell asleep. When I woke up, all the goats had run away. Worrying that my father would scold me, I burst out wailing and attracted two wolves, which stood right behind me, ready to snatch me away. I didn't realize they were behind me. I just kept crying. Wolves are ferocious but suspicious animals. My nonstop crying must have confused them. They just stood there. Then my father arrived; he knew how to handle wolves. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and howled. Then the herding dogs heard his howling and started to bark. The wolves became scared and ran away reluctantly. That night, we found all the strayed goats. When people heard the story, they all believed I was protected by God.

When I was seventeen, I caught smallpox without realizing it. On my way home one day, my body felt feverish, as if many bean sprouts were pushing through my pores. I found a small stream nearby and crawled over to drink water from it. I soon passed out. When I woke up, I noticed the red spots appearing like worms on my face and body. For the next day and half, I was in and out of consciousness. Then a dog found me and started barking, catching the attention of passersby, who carried me to a doctor's home. The doctor saved my life. If God hadn't been with me, the dog wouldn't have found me.

Then I survived the brutal beatings and recovered from my rheumatism during the Land Reform Movement, and my wife saved my life when I was dying inside the labor camp in 1959.

Liao:
You have a good wife.

Zhang:
When she married me, she was only seventeen, a pretty girl. She grew up in a proletariat family. In those days, she could choose any man she wanted. I saw her when my brother and I went to preach in her village. I asked a matchmaker to connect us. Luckily, she said yes. My wife suffered so much for me. At the moment, I'm fairly healthy, but she's been sick for more than seven years with rheumatism and cancer. There's no hope for a cure. Even though I'm helpless and can't share her suffering, I hope she can be comforted by the love of God. Without my wife, I would have died a long time ago. At this time, she's getting weaker and weaker. I'm getting old too. I can't share her pain. That's probably our last hurdle in life.

Epilogue

Elder Zhang died quietly at his home on the day of the Chinese Moon Festival in 2007. He was eighty-five.

I
t was a scene reminiscent of the Mao era when, each night, members of our commune in rural Sichuan would gather at a courtyard house and sit around gas lamps for political study sessions or public denunciations of landlords and counterrevolutionaries or to hear the year-end income results or argue about grain distribution. Having already worked a full day in the fields, everyone was tired and many ended up dozing off.

This gathering was different; for a start, everyone was awake, alert, and eager, even enthusiastic. The local driver I had engaged as my guide said I would be attending the Eucharist and church leaders from villages in a two-hundred-kilometer radius would be present. This particular service happened once a month, moving to a different village each time, and pastors and elders would return home to deliver Holy Communion to their congregations.

The driver said it was a tremendous honor to host a multivillage service. With so many villages in the Sayingpan region, many had to compete for the opportunity. When their turns came, the host villagers would turn the occasion into a major festival. Out of curiosity, I wondered why the services were not performed inside a chapel. “I saw several white church buildings on my way here,” I said.

“Services are normally conducted at individual houses,” he said. “For this, the host will slaughter pigs and chickens and prepare a banquet for every brother and sister at the service.” The food would come tomorrow after morning prayers. Tonight would be more formal.

People began to sit. I found a corner, away from the makeshift stage in front of the house. I had barely sat down when three pairs of hands stretched out in front of me, one holding a cup of tea and the other two with bowls filled to the brim with soft candies and dried black watermelon seeds. I hesitated and then accepted them with gratitude.

The crowd grew thicker, knees touching knees, the smell of tobacco and garlic heavy in the air. Above us was a clear sky filled with stars and a crescent moon. The service had apparently begun, but I didn't understand the language, nor could I see who was speaking from the forest of heads in front of me. So far as I could tell, I was the only Han; everyone else was Yi, a small but distinct ethnic group within China numbering about eight million, and I was unfamiliar with their clan customs. I might as well have been in deepest, darkest Africa, rather than in a corner of my own county. But I felt quite safe, if very much alone. The voice from the stage continued uninterrupted for about an hour and a half. No one interrupted; there was no chanting or singing.

Acutely embarrassed after taking a flash photograph of the minister onstage, I slunk out of the courtyard and bumped into the driver. As he tried to explain what was being said from the stage, he stopped midsentence, took my arm, and led me to a gray-haired man who had just emerged from the common toilet. “This is Reverend Zhang Mao-en . . .” the driver said, “the person you want to interview.” Zhang was the most senior clergy in the Sayingpan region; it was he who was presiding over the service.

We quickly exchanged greetings, and I pressed my case for an interview, which was not immediately confirmed. He seemed intrigued that I was working on a book about Christians in China and said, “I will see what I can do. It will probably be late. Is that okay?”

I nodded: “It's not a problem. I can wait.”

“You don't have to stick around here,” he said. “You've had a long day. Go stay at my house tonight. We can talk in the morning. At six? Your driver knows where I live.”

I accepted Zhang's offer. It was almost two in the morning when we reached his house. Zhang's wife poured hot water into two wooden basins, and we soaked our feet. Then she led us by oil lamp to a bedroom on the second floor, where, exhausted, I dropped fully clothed onto the hard bed.

As the sound of barking dogs reached me, I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning. Zhang was not there, so we retraced our path and found him at a farmer's house, standing at a stove in a dark cavelike kitchen with his assistant. He had barely slept. They were preparing boxes of coin-shaped wafer-thin cakes and bottles of red wine for the pastors to take with them to use for celebrating the Eucharist.

We sat near the stove. His assistant, the new face of the church, retreated to a corner of the sooty room, and Zhang closed his eyes for a few minutes before indicating he was ready for my questions. It was in the early morning of August 6, 2006.

Liao Yiwu:
When did you become a Christian?

Zhang Mao-en:
When I was still inside my mother's womb.

Liao:
What do you mean?

Zhang:
My family has been Christian for ninety-two years. If my oldest brother, Zhang Run-en, were still alive, he would also be ninety-two. My father converted when Run-en was born and had him baptized. We are one of the earliest Christian families in Yunnan province. A Yi family on the other side of the Pudu River became believers even earlier. At the beginning of the last century, there was a lot of trade across the Pudu River, and preachers followed the merchants on horseback and brought the gospel to Dega, and from Dega it was taken into the mountain regions—Shengfa, Zehei, Malutang, and Salaowu.

In the early 1920s, those areas were very poor. There were no schools before the church arrived. After Japan invaded China in 1937, an Australian missionary escaped to the region and founded a seminary here. I don't know his English name, but his Chinese name was Zhang Erchang. By the time I was born, in 1939, there were a lot of Christians—my parents and siblings, my parents' parents, immediate and distant relatives, my fellow villagers rich and poor. Soon after I learned to speak, I could memorize simple hymns. The first book my parents gave me was the Bible. In remote Yi villages many people were illiterate, but you only needed to mention a certain passage from the Bible and they could recite it from memory.

Before the Communist takeover, my family was considered wealthy. My father was an elder in the church. He used to preach with Reverend Zhang Erchang. At home, he had to run the family business. My father was raised in a family with four generations of farmers. In my father's time, prices for crops had dropped and there was hardly any money made from farming. So they started raising cattle, horses, pigs, and ducks. They also raised bees. To get a better price for their animals, my family would ship their pigs and ducks to bigger markets in Jiulong and Zhuanlong. In those days, there were no trucks. My relatives would have to herd the ducks and pigs all the way down there. It normally took about ten to fifteen days. We also harvested honey twice a year and then hired porters to carry it to the provincial capital city of Kunming. We had fifty beehives. They were hard to take care of but quite profitable.

With the money we earned, my father was able to donate food and supplies to the church. Soon, the business and preaching became very exhausting for him. When I was four, he died and his brother took over.

The early 1940s was a golden age for Christianity. Our main church was in Salaowu. We had twelve pastors. There were branches in Shengfa, Pufu, Zehei, Malutang, Dasongshu, Jiaoxi, and Jiaoping. The branch in Dega was the second largest, next to the main church. My uncle became an elder in our branch. He held that position until after the Communist takeover in 1949. Then all religious activities were banned.

My oldest brother and I were both born in the year of the rabbit, but he was twenty-four years older than I. At the age of twenty, he married a woman in Pufu and moved in with his wife's family. His father-in-law was a church elder in Pufu and needed my brother's help. My brother was a graduate of the local Christian high school. He was quite smart and dedicated. He did remarkably well in the world of humans as well as the world of God. He was the county chief in Pufu and then took charge of the military draft. He used his positions within the local government to create favorable conditions for the spread of the gospel. When the church established the Southwestern Theological Seminary in Salaowu, he quit his government job and became its administrator. He personally selected every teacher and was involved in scouting and recruiting local talent. Every year, he donated more than a hundred kilograms of grain to support the preachers. All the foreign missionaries liked him.

My brother was also dedicated to social issues. Historically, the region was notorious for opium addiction. It was widespread among both the rich and the poor. On top of that, many Yi people were also addicted to gambling. These two scourges led to lots of social turbulence. Robbers and triad members ran rampant. It was a headache for every government in power. My elder brother strongly believed that the Christian faith would improve people's moral values. It would help people kick their opium and gambling addictions. He actively promoted faith as a way to cleanse social ills.

Liao:
Your brother had a promising future . . .

Zhang:
Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of thirty-six.

Liao:
Did he die of illness?

Zhang:
No. He was executed in 1951, when I was twelve. His passing left a painful memory in my family, but he left this world in dignity.

Liao:
What happened?

Zhang:
When the Land Reform Movement started, our family was a big target. My oldest brother's family was classified as landlords. My oldest brother and his father-in-law, the church elder, were locked up in a county jail. They were tortured. My oldest brother had served in the defeated Nationalist government, but he had a clean record. He was very well liked by local folks here. So when the new Communist government sent work teams to different villages and repeatedly mobilized people to stand out and renounce my brother, nobody was willing to do it openly. In the 1950s there was a major push to execute and eliminate members of the triad and evil landlords. My brother was spared, initially. But the government wouldn't let him go. In 1951 they threw him in the Luquan County jail and, under pressure from the government, the village officials, who used to be poor and homeless, agreed to “settle scores” with my brother.

We were not allowed to see him; we didn't know what to do to defend him. I found out later that while he was charged with crimes, they never gave details of what he had done. They had to come up with something to justify why they had locked him up for so long. I was told that a work-team leader read the charges cooked up by a local village chief, but when the leader asked for details, the village chief couldn't answer him and felt the question made him lose face, so he yelled back at the work-team leader. Since there was not enough evidence, another village official suggested that my brother be spared the death penalty, but an official at the regional level was worried that sparing my elder brother would set a bad precedent and would dampen the enthusiasm of the masses. In that era, to be a potential candidate for village leadership, all you had to do was scream loudly at public denunciation meetings and be ruthless with “class enemies.”

You are too young to understand what it was like. We were treated much worse than animals. People would torture us whenever they felt like it. During the peak of the campaign, the government work teams fanned the sentiment of hatred. Even the nicest and kindest peasants began to wave their fists and slap or kick us. Toward the end, revolutionary peasants didn't need a reason to kill a landlord. At public denunciation meetings, people became carried away with their emotions and would drag someone out and shoot him on the spot. Bang, bang, and the person was gone forever. Nobody questioned this ruthless practice or took responsibility. Most of the work-team members were sent from the cities. They had no knowledge of what was going on at the local level. Chairman Mao said officials should listen to the voice of the people. And work-team members didn't dare ignore the voice of the people. Once people became brainwashed by Communist ideology and by Mao's propaganda, their thinking became chaotic. All humanity was lost. At its peak, even the work team found it hard to rein in the fanaticism.

Let me explain. In this area, it was rare to find anyone who was not addicted to opium or gambling. Only those who had embraced God had the stamina to kick their habits. When I was a kid, I remember that people in this area didn't grow crops. Instead, they grew poppies. We used to run around in the poppy fields to catch butterflies. People also gambled heavily. This was a very strange phenomenon. People's wealth switched hands very quickly. In the afternoon, the person might be a rich landowner. By evening, he was homeless, having gambled everything away—his land, his house, even his wife.

When the Communists came, they banned opium smoking and gambling, and they banned Christianity. Apart from working in the fields, people didn't have anything else to do in the evenings. Political campaigns turned into a form of entertainment. They devoted all their extra energy to beating up people, killing people, and confiscating the property of others. Those homeless drug addicts and gamblers suddenly became loyal revolutionary allies. They didn't have to pay off their debts; their gambling and drug habits, their poverty, the practice of pawning their wives and children for drug money, their homelessness, everything was the fault of landlords exploiting poor revolutionaries.

Poverty became a badge of honor, and the children of the poor became the offspring of the true proletariat. They felt superior to everyone else and were well fed and clothed. They didn't even have to take any responsibility when killing someone at public denunciation meetings. That was more fun than smoking opium and gambling, don't you think?

Liao:
In the Mao era, we say, people became the true masters of the nation.

Zhang:
The Communist Party's policies might have been well meant, but the people who implemented them took a lot of liberties and interpreted them in their own way. Random killing was quite liberating. My oldest brother knew he wouldn't survive.