Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (13 page)

Fu the Enforcer nodded enthusiastically at everything Cadre Huang had said. When he finished, she spoke briefly. “You are a very independent female,” she said. “I hope that when you go back you will make revolution among women.”

The criticism session was over. As I left, Cadre Huang remembered something. “Your textbooks are experimental. You may take them, but please don’t pass them around.” I managed not to roll my eyes. Stalin in Chinese was now a state secret.

As Professor Lin had suggested, I went to see Chancellor Zhou to make a last-ditch plea to stay. He greeted me with great warmth and ushered me into his living room, where he poured tea and offered me caramel candies. “Well, what can I do for you?” he said, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses like a Chinese Santa Claus. I was in no mood for chitchat. I said bluntly that I was really upset at being expelled.

“The plan was always that you would study here three to six months,” Chancellor Zhou said, the twinkle fading in his eyes. “Now the six months are up, and you must go. It was the plan all along. You yourself are very clear.”

Chancellor Zhou began to talk about the weather. Clearly, the meeting was over. I was supposed to accept his version of events and leave, politely, without banging the door behind me. But my Canadian forthrightness kept rearing its head. I asked if I was being expelled because I had done something wrong. He recited a synopsis of Chinese history since the Opium War. I repeated my question. He stared at the wall and launched into a list of China’s major cities. Five times I asked him, and five times he changed the subject.

“Well, if I’m not being expelled, then could you put in a request for an immediate extension for me?” I asked.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” he replied.

Seeing that I wasn’t going to give up, Chancellor Zhou summoned
his wife to rescue him. She entered the living room, her face wreathed in smiles. Each time Zhou and I were on the verge of shouting at one another, she smoothed us both down with gentle clucking noises. After more than an hour of this, I finally asked outright if my expulsion had anything to do with my Swedish friend. Chancellor Zhou looked deeply annoyed and repeated irritably, for the umpteenth time, that I was leaving because my father had previously requested a term of three to six months.

I must have looked like I was about to cry. His wife said gently, “Yes, that’s the only reason. It’s none other.”

Zhou looked uncomfortable. “I’m just passing on what they told us to tell you. This is the reason they gave us,” he said. When I asked who “they” were, he replied, “I don’t know who is in charge of you. When the leaders give us an order, we just accept it and implement it.”

Chancellor Zhou knew the importance of toeing the Party line. His brilliant career had nearly been derailed soon after the Communist victory. After obtaining his doctorate from Cal. Tech. in just one year, he worked under Einstein at Princeton. In the late 1940s, he returned to Beijing but got cold feet on the eve of the Communist victory. He quietly left for the United States, where he worked on rocket-launching systems for the navy. Then he changed his mind again and returned to China. Two years later, when Beijing began investigating his American connections, Zhou made a complete confession. He had worried, he said, that China would not permit free scientific research. He blamed “U.S. government special agents” for luring him to the States. As a reward for his public denunciation of Washington, Zhou was confirmed as chairman of the Physics Society of China. When I met him in 1972, he was earning 300 yuan a month, the same as Mao. He had joined the Communist Party. And in addition to being chancellor, he was vice-chairman of the powerful Revolutionary Committee, which ran Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution.

Chancellor Zhou might have been vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, but he was no revolutionary, I realized with disillusion. He had prospered all these years because he was a yes-man who accepted orders without question. At home, I would
have staged a sit-in at his office. But I had been in China too long. I felt defeated. As I was leaving, I remembered that he had called me a dogmatist. I tried to think of something equally cutting. Mao had criticized Party members who carried out orders blindly without regard to actual conditions, calling them bureaucratic.

“That’s a very bureaucratic way to run a country,” I said.

He burst into gales of laughter.

“Please come again,” his wife said politely as I forced myself to smile on my way out.

Once outside, I felt trapped. I couldn’t go back to my dormitory, where everyone was waiting to hear the outcome. I got on my bicycle and rode furiously, taking deep gulps of cold air to prevent myself from crying.

The rest of the week went by in a surreal blur. Fu the Enforcer took me to get a cholera shot. I sold my red Phoenix bicycle, most of my clothes and my desk lamp at the second-hand store in Haidian. Erica lent me a hundred dollars because I still didn’t have enough money to cover my trip to Hong Kong. As I packed last-minute items, she suggested, in a surge of paranoia, that I burn my notes because many of the lectures we had been allowed to audit were considered “internal” and not for foreign consumption. I got rid of everything except my precious diary and my Stalin texts. I wasn’t very experienced at spy stuff, and I dropped the flaming sheets into our squat toilet too early, cracking the porcelain. I confessed the damage to Teacher Fu, who assured me it was no problem. Just as she thought it normal that my mail was opened, she thought it perfectly natural for me to burn my vocabulary lists.

Everyone but Erica tried to maintain the fiction that my departure was a planned and happy event. Chef Liu baked a cake. My classmates showered me with the kind of gifts they liked — a doll, a plastic panda, postcards, a green silk diary, papercuts of horses. Only Erica, who had been reassured she could stay until August, understood me. She gave me six Mao badges and a Red Guard armband. Her roommate forced us to sing, but no one’s heart was really in it. Everyone refused to eat the cake.

Chancellor Zhou went along with the charade. Despite our acrimonious encounter, he invited me to a farewell dinner at his home
that Sunday, my last night at Beijing University. On Saturday night, Cadre Huang dropped by my dormitory. “The time for going to Chancellor Zhou’s home has changed,” he said, staring at me through his glasses. I stared back in astonishment. He cleared his throat and giggled nervously. “You will not be leaving Monday morning as planned. The reason is the procedures have not yet been completed.” He said he had no other information. I was instantly hopeful. Erica groaned. She couldn’t take any more surprises.

That Sunday I spent in agonizing limbo, afraid to leave my room for fear of missing a message. On Monday, I should have been on a plane. On Tuesday, Cadre Huang and Teacher Fu walked into my room. He cleared his throat and giggled. “Number one. Because you have requested an extension. Number two. Because your parents have requested an extension at the Ottawa embassy. Number three. Because Professor Paul Lin sent a telegram to Chancellor Zhou. Therefore you can stay until the end of August.” They all left the room, leaving me with my mouth agape.

Perhaps someone in the Chinese government decided an expulsion wasn’t the right technique for winning the hearts and minds of Chinese-Canadians. Perhaps they decided my meeting with Anders really was an accident. Who knows? Again, everyone closed ranks. Only Erica refused to pretend the past week hadn’t happened. The new Party line was I could stay because I had asked for an extension. Fu began teaching right where we had left off. Was it all a bad dream? Then where was my desk lamp? My bike? All my clothes?

My near-expulsion was a turning point for me. Everyone had gone to such trouble to show me a Potemkin China. I had visited model factories, lived with a model roommate and studied under a model teacher. But the past week had been an eye-opener. I had tasted the Chinese pear. I had learned first-hand about the real China. And I now understood, in a very small way, but with a clarity I would never forget, what every Chinese person endured.

Master Liu, to whom I was apprenticed at the Beijing Number One Machine Tool Factory.
Photo: Jan Wong

Cutting wheat at harvest time, hoping to reform my bourgeois thinking
.

T
en days after my reprieve, Cadre Huang surprised us by announcing we were going to the Beijing Number One Machine Tool Factory for fifty days of labor. Erica and I let out a cheer. We had been lobbying for months for a chance at thought reform. For foreign students like us, hard labor was an honor. In my case in particular, it meant I was no longer
persona non grata
.

According to Mao, everyone needed physical labor. For class enemies, it was a punishment. For ordinary people, it was an inoculation against bourgeois thinking. For intellectuals, sweating with the proletariat was both a punishment and a prophylactic. In one year, Scarlets class had already been through mandatory stints of
kaimen banxue
, or open-door schooling, at a farm, a factory, a seaport and a military base.

The Number One Machine Tool Factory, which made lathes, was one of six model factories directly under the political control of Mao and his radical wife. In 1950, Mao had sent his eldest son there to work incognito as deputy Party secretary. In 1966, Number One was the factory considered politically reliable enough to send Workers Propaganda Teams into Beijing University.

Erica, our teachers and I shared one small room in a dingy workers’ dormitory. The toilet stalls down the hall were so disgusting I
learned to breathe through my mouth. Each morning, we ignored the first, ear-splitting 5 a.m. bell and got up with the 6 a.m. one. We washed in groggy silence, then donned coarse work suits, stiff denim caps and canvas work gloves with seams so thick they gave me blisters. It was still dark when we stumbled outside to board a city bus for the fifteen-minute ride to the factory.

Number One, a sprawling collection of low-lying ugly brick buildings in southeast Beijing, was originally a munitions factory. The Chinese government saw to it that the proletariat lived better than intellectuals. As “workers,” we now could shower every day, instead of just twice a week. And unlike the slop served at the Big Canteen, the factory dining halls provided a wide selection of dumplings, noodles, breads and stir-fried dishes.

I was “apprenticed” to Master Liu, a fortyish man with a perpetually anxious look on his face, probably because he was supposed to teach me how to use a lathe. According to socialist etiquette, I called him Master Liu and he called me Little Wong. He had typical class-enemy looks — sallow skin, shifty eyes and a scrawny build — but in fact he was a kindly man with a mania for playing basketball. Under his influence, I joined the women’s team, where my towering five-foot, three-inch height was an asset.

In the middle of the first afternoon, Master Liu told me to start tidying up to get ready for a political meeting. Wiping the gunk off my hands with oily rags, I was beside myself with excitement; Beijing University had always barred me from political study. I joined about a dozen workers sitting in a circle on little folding stools. A middle-aged worker cleared his throat. “Today we are going to discuss with what attitude we should receive the opening of Beijing’s Sixth Labor Union Congress. Please, everyone actively speak out.”

I looked around expectantly. Granted, it wasn’t the world’s sexiest topic, but what would the proletariat have to say? Nothing, it turned out. There was an awkward silence. Finally, a young worker in stained denim spoke up.

“Uh, uh, the proletariat, uh, um, the dictatorship of the proletariat, er, the proletariat is the leading class. It must lead everything.” He stopped, unsure of what to say next. He reddened slightly.

“Speak out,” said the middle-aged worker, nodding encouragingly.

“Uh, well, I think the way we should receive the opening of Beijing’s Sixth Labor Union Congress is to, ah, urn, study Marxism! Study Marxism-Leninism! Yes, to correctly receive the opening we must study Marxism-Leninism,” he said. He sat back, looking relieved. Others, all men, began to talk in monotones. Many stared at the patch of concrete floor in front of them. The first worker had set the tone. Each speaker exhorted everyone else to study Marxism-Leninism. Even I felt my eyes glazing over. When the discussion leader finally announced the meeting was over, people bolted for the door.