Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (10 page)

“I was fourteen when the Cultural Revolution started,” she said. “When the schools shut down a year or two later, I became a Red Guard. Everyone did. In 1966, I marched in Tiananmen Square, waving the Little Red Book. When I saw Chairman Mao, I cried. In 1969, we were sent down to the countryside to remold our thinking. I was one of about thirty thousand students sent to Yanan from Beijing that year.”

I had always thought it was wonderful of Mao to let Chinese youth help transform the countryside, and themselves in the process. Scarlet painted a different picture. At first, enthusiasm was high, she recalled. But chronic hunger, grueling conditions and homesickness took their toll. The urban Red Guards couldn’t understand the local dialect. And they didn’t know how to farm.

“I despised the peasants,” said Scarlet as she curled up on her bed. “I thought they were so ignorant and dirty. And I hated Yanan. It
was a miserable little place. I had to live in a cave. I had to carry water from a well. I got lice. Every day we had to walk a long way to our fields. I would rather have done anything in the city – sweep floors in a factory, anything — than stay there.

“Some students begged their parents to get them out. Others went back to visit their families and stayed there a whole year. The city kids were so upset that some started getting married without the leadership’s permission. They weren’t actually married, but they lived together. Some even started stealing. The situation was so bad that some students were put in jail.

“Authorities in Beijing were really concerned because it looked as if the experiment would fail. They sent three thousand cadres to Yanan, many of them veterans of the Long March. They told the students stories about the revolutionary tradition of Yanan and they criticized the people of Yanan for their selfishness.

“We students gradually began to change. We thought the peasants were ignorant, but it was they who showed us how to cook our food, they who taught us how to farm. That summer there was a flash flood. The peasants made it safely down the hill, but we were stranded on our mountain plots. The peasants climbed back up and led us by the hand down the hill. We were deeply moved. The peasants said they considered us sent to them directly by Chairman Mao, and so they felt responsible for us. The peasants really, really love Chairman Mao. With their help, we gradually changed.”

In my naivete, I had never dreamed there were problems sending young people to the countryside. What I didn’t realize then is that from 1967 to 1972, after Mao no longer needed their stormtrooper services, ten million teenagers, clumsily dubbed going-up-to-the-mountains-and-down-to-the-countryside intellectual youth, were abruptly sent into rural China. To call them intellectuals was a joke, but next to the illiterate peasants, they were indeed educated.

“When some students were offered a chance to come to Beijing University, they refused, saying their responsibility was to build up Yanan. And some even asked for the worst pieces of land,” she said. Scarlet, never a fanatic, jumped at the chance to escape and was easily chosen. “No Yanan girl my age had any education,” she said.
“They stayed home to help with the cleaning and cooking. By the time they turned eighteen, they were already married.” Scarlet wanted to study science, but central-planning czars put her in history. “You have to study what you are told,” she said. I was shocked. What if someone had ordered me to major in math? No wonder she sat at her desk each night frowning over her books. It turned out Erica’s roommate wanted to study history and had been assigned to linguistics. Scarlet looked at me as I digested all this information.

“You didn’t know I only have a grade-six education?” she said. I felt a rush of shame. Barely literate, she was struggling to cope with first-year college courses, and I was exasperated with her for not helping me analyze Stalin. At the rate I was learning new vocabulary, my reading level was soon going to equal hers.

After that, we began confiding in one another. A few nights later, just as I was about to drop off to sleep, she asked why I hadn’t talked much before. I was surprised — and remorseful. I thought she hadn’t noticed. I muttered a half truth — that my Chinese wasn’t good enough. Something happened to her, too, because she stopped mopping the floors every morning. Now we took turns mopping, and only every two or three days,
if
we felt like it. She even stopped going out to fill our hot-water thermoses with her former unbroken regularity.

Years later, when we became real friends, Scarlet remembered none of the early tension. In 1994, I invited her and another classmate to the newly opened Hard Rock Café in Beijing. We shouted to one another over the din of a Madonna song and gawked at the Sistine Chapel–like mural in the domed ceiling—Mao and the Rolling Stones at the Great Wall. I looked at Scarlet with affection. Her youthful voluptuousness had melted into heaviness around the hips. My other classmate, Zeng Lin (Forest Zeng), who had briefly been Erica’s roommate, still looked svelte in a figure-hugging black dress. When she scanned the menu and mentioned she was afraid of gaining weight, Scarlet and I both chortled. We stopped laughing when she told us she had been diagnosed with hardening arteries in her brain.

We were all forty-one years old, and feeling it. As I watched Scarlet squint at the menu because she needed bifocals, I reflected that she and my other classmates were part of Mao’s Lost Generation. Scarlet hadn’t finished high school because of the Cultural Revolution. In Yanan, she spent years toiling in the fields before getting into university on the strength of her political correctness. At college, ongoing campaigns wrecked her last chance at an education. After she graduated, a mere formality since no worker-peasant-soldier student could ever be allowed to fail, Maoism was discredited, so nobody wanted to hire someone like her who had spent her time doing heavy labor instead of studying. By the time she married, new population-control rules limited her to a single child. Recently, Deng’s education czar had downgraded her university diploma to a technical school certificate, a move that affected housing, salary, promotions and perks. And now, she was stuck in a dead-end job at the Beijing Library. Due to a surge in unemployment, she faced involuntary early retirement in just four years. I shuddered. Retirement? I had just weaned Sam, my second son, a month earlier.

“I’ve changed my name,” Scarlet announced after we finished ordering. Although the pronunciation was unchanged, it now meant deep water. She explained, “That was my original name. I changed it to Scarlet during the Cultural Revolution.”

I asked if she was now a Party member. She told me that she had applied many times but always was rejected. “I really wanted to join, but they told me I was too simple, too naive.” As she dug into a plate of ribs, she sighed. “I was really stupid. I missed such a good chance to speak English with you. I was afraid of all the consequences.” I asked why she had been chosen as my roommate. She frowned as she considered the question. “I was such an idiot. Whatever they told me, I believed,” said Scarlet. “Whatever they told me to do, I did.”

Forest agreed. “You were picked because you were the most obedient,” she said. “You were the most trustworthy person in the whole class.”

I was surprised that Beijing got very cold but rarely had snow That winter of 1972 the temperatures plunged, freezing the canals and
lakes. People had no skates, but still they frolicked, slipping and sliding. Little boys, and the rare girl, knelt on makeshift wooden sleds, no more than boards, really, on metal runners, and pumped and pushed themselves ahead using two tiny poles, like legless cross-country skiers.

On December 11, Kim Il-sung’s
Selected Works
suddenly appeared on the shelves of our reading room. The next day, several black Mercedes-Benz limousines disgorged nine neatly dressed North Koreans. We met them that noon when they marched single file into our private dining room. Ignoring Chef Liu, they stared at Erica and me as if
we
were the interlopers. We all sat down in silence at the same long table as the cook nervously brought out the food.

There were two women and seven men, all in their early twenties. Three were going to study Chinese, three English and three French. I pitied them. It was bad enough studying Chinese in China during the Cultural Revolution, but English and French? The North Koreans had little choice. They literally weren’t on speaking terms with most Western countries.

Unlike Erica and me, who tried our best to blend in, the North Koreans had no intention of slumming. The last thing they wanted to be mistaken for were Chinese Communists. They felt infinitely superior. All children of senior officials, they didn’t want Chinese roommates and used their dormitory rooms only for the noon siesta. Each day after classes, they were driven back to their embassy. I suppose neither country wanted their nationals getting too friendly. What if they compared notes on personality cults? Ostensibly friends, about all the two Communist nations agreed on was the evils of U.S. imperialism. Behind the scenes, they quarreled over everything else: the Soviet Union, agricultural collectivization, nuclear weapons and whose great leader was greatest.

The women reminded me of Salvation Army matrons in their prim navy suits. The men looked like Star Trek extras in their high-necked Kim Il-sung suits. Although the Chinese had mostly stopped wearing Mao badges by 1972, the North Koreans each wore a discreet Kim badge just above their hearts. Back in 1972, Erica and I must have been the only Westerners in the world lunching daily with North Koreans. I was surprised they never helped
clean up after meals and even more shocked when they dumped out their food if something wasn’t to their taste. Perhaps it was a clever new tactic in the psychological warfare simmering between China and North Korea — conspicuous non-consumption among food-rationing nations. “We have more food than you do, nyah-nyah.” That North Korea could not feed its own people was still a state secret. Certainly, the limos and tailored wool suits impressed the Chinese.

The North Koreans treated Erica and me as if we had a contagious disease. Even though I spoke English, Chinese and some French, they rarely spoke to me. Only one was friendly, but maybe he was crazy. His English teacher told me that during classes he made facial contortions, then burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Of course, anyone would go a little nuts with the strain of finally getting out of Pyongyang, only to land in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.

I nicknamed him Skirts because he kept making passes at Erica and me. Once, while I was washing the dishes after supper, he invited me for a stroll. I pointed to a dish towel and told him to start drying. He patted me on my behind and left. Whenever the school took us to model operas and hockey games, Skirts maneuvered to sit next to Erica or me. I learned to give him a sharp elbow when he leaned across the armrest, trying to paste his face against mine. Once, he dropped into my room and said with a leer, “I think you are beautiful.” Scarlet was shocked.

When I registered a protest, the school was not interested. As a socialist sibling, North Korea was untouchable. What’s more, Skirts’s parents were both on the North Korean Central Committee, which I assumed out-ranked my dad’s presidency of the Montreal Chinese Restaurant Association. “The Korean and Chinese peoples are like lips and teeth,” said Cadre Huang, my handler at the Foreign Students Office. It was his inscrutable way of telling me to get lost.

One day, my favorite lace undies disappeared from the communal clothesline in the women’s washroom. I reported the theft to my teachers. They suggested I was mistaken. Did they think I was trying to stir up trouble? The following week I lost another pair. A few days later, I was relieved when Erica lost a pair of
her
underpants.
When we reported the latest panty raid, my teachers looked dismayed. “Perhaps a class enemy is sneaking into Building Twenty-five,” said Teacher Fu.

Two months later, I had lost my fifth pair of underpants and was getting desperate. Western underwear was unavailable in China. It was one thing to “go native” with a Mao suit, but I drew the line at the luridly printed homemade boxer shorts my female classmates wore. Then they began losing their underwear, too, half a dozen pairs of boxer shorts in all. I began to suspect the Koreans when I realized the panties disappeared only during the daytime, never at night when they were back at their embassy. My suspicions, of course, focused on Skirts.

One day during the noon siesta, Erica caught one of the North Korean men lurking in our washroom. It wasn’t Skirts. It was Im Changjoo, who was studying French. He quickly regained his composure and washed his hands as if that was why he had popped into the ladies’ room. My teachers were worried when Erica told them, but still they did nothing. The chance encounter wasn’t proof, they said. We continued to lose underwear.

In April, the mystery was solved. A PLA soldier student caught Im with a pair of panties. I never got the precise details, but school authorities went to the trouble of searching through the sewer pipes, where they found most of our underpants. No one told us, of course. One day we noticed Im was missing at lunch. I asked the other Koreans where he was. “Serious nervous disorders,” said one curtly. Im was treated for a breakdown in a Beijing hospital, then sent back to Pyongyang.

As for Skirts, he later became a senior official in North Korea’s defense ministry. I think of him whenever I hear about the latest nuclear-inspection crisis in Pyongyang.