Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (14 page)

That first night, waiting in line in the canteen, I spotted a commotion ahead of me. Two young men had faced off, their noses inches apart.

“You turtle’s egg!” one of them screamed, using the ancient Chinese word for bastard.

“I fuck your mother’s cunt!” the other yelled back, using a more contemporary phrase.

At that, the motherfucker slapped the turtle’s egg, who responded by heaving a bowl of steaming dumplings in the other’s face. Someone threw a punch, and they began fighting in earnest until bystanders pulled them apart. I had a feeling my Chinese was going to take a great leap forward at the factory.

Fu and Dai took careful notes of everything I said at political meetings. Self-conscious, especially after my near expulsion, I tried hard to live up to their expectations. I wasn’t yet aware that Zhou Enlai had personally approved my studies in China. In hindsight, it was obvious: I hadn’t been given a deluxe scholarship for nothing. Someone very high up wanted to know how their investment was doing. What kind of questions was I asking? What was I thinking? In China’s eyes, I wasn’t just a misguided Montreal Maoist coming back to find her roots. I was a secret weapon in training, a propaganda tool to further China’s cause in the West.

No one dared point out that political study cut deeply into production time. On Mondays we held “production meetings” to whip up enthusiasm for output quotas. On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and
Thursdays, we held “discussion meetings” to express support for national policies such as birth control. (At one such meeting, workers publicly stated, giggling and blushing, the kind of contraceptives they used.) On Fridays we studied Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

My initial excitement subsided. I quickly learned that most meetings were excruciatingly boring. For once, everyone disregarded one of Mao’s more useful quotations: “Meetings also should not go on too long.” Political meetings often lasted several hours, and some the entire day. In a typical two-hour meeting at the factory, the discussion leader read Lenin, then posed two deadly dull questions: What are the differences between a dictatorship of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie? And how do you consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat? I watched an older, overweight worker next to me make superhuman efforts to stay awake. He was so sleepy, his eyes seemed to droop shut of their own accord, and he soon nodded off.

The work was equally boring. Once, we spent the whole day counting boxes and boxes of screws to see if there were 451 in a box or just 450. With Master Liu’s help, I also learned to read simple blueprints. We scored lines on metal to guide the cutters, using a stinky liquid that looked dull green in the bottle but changed to iridescent purple on metal. Master Liu had joined Number One in 1953. During a lull one afternoon he told me his family history.

“My mother died of lung disease when I was twelve because we didn’t have any money to see a doctor. My father was a tenant farmer who came to Beijing to look for work just as the Japanese invaded China. He was a messenger at the Academy of Science, and didn’t earn enough. We never ate rice, just a fodder of husks mixed with the residue of peanuts which had been pressed for oil. Life was very bitter. We scavenged through garbage. My father was unable to take care of both me and my little sister, so we gave her away to be a servant. I have no relatives left except my little sister, and I don’t know if she is dead or alive. Now my life is very good because Chairman Mao liberated our country. If only I could see my little sister again I would be so happy. I won’t say any more because I see that you already have tears in your eyes.”

It was true. I cried when he said that his father had given away his only sister. China was like that. Ask someone about their past, and the average person had horrific tales. It was why the Communist Party had been so popular in the 1950s, and why people were willing to forgive so much, despite the excesses of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Not all the workers at Number One were bona fide members of the proletariat. One afternoon, a thirty-four-year-old fitter came up to me and hesitantly tried out a few words of English. He told me that I was the first native speaker he had ever met. Fu the Enforcer had gone out for a meeting, and Master Liu was busy with his work. At first the worker was nervous, but he relaxed when nobody paid us attention. We huddled in a corner of the workshop. I asked him about himself, and I thought he said he was surnamed Wang, but he meant it literally, as in “monarch.” He was a Manchu, he said, and his grandfather was the younger brother of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China. “Everyone in the workshop knows my past,” he said quietly, adding that his wife was Manchu, too. I thought how different his life would have been if he had been born a century earlier. What was it like to be a prince among the proles, I wondered. When I asked how others treated him, he was silent. “We haven’t told our son and daughter anything about our family history,” he said finally. “It wouldn’t be good for them to know.”

Perhaps because the proletariat was considered more politically reliable than intellectuals like our teachers, the workers at Number One were authorized to invite us home. A worker named Master Shi invited us to dinner to meet her mother, a shrunken woman with cropped gray hair who chain-smoked and looked much older than her sixty-six years.

“I used to wear my hair knotted in a bun in the back, but during the Cultural Revolution I made ideological progress,” said Granny, as we politely addressed her. “I cut it off, and now it’s much more convenient.” She had a wry smile that revealed she had no upper teeth. She dressed like all old Chinese ladies, in a simple white blouse, buttoned Chinese-style down the side, and pressed
gray cotton trousers. Her ankles were appallingly thin, one-third the size of mine. I couldn’t help staring at her tiny feet, encased in black velvet slippers. I had been too young to understand that my paternal grandmother had had bound feet. When Granny saw I was interested, she planted her cigarette in her mouth, slipped off her velvet slipper and let me feel her foot. Under a thin nylon sock, it felt like the hard and bony claw of some prehistoric bird. The front part had atrophied. All the toes except the big one had been completely bent underneath the ball of her foot.

“It’s impossible to buy shoes for bound feet because everyone’s shape is different,” said Granny. “Everyone has to sew her own slippers.” She rarely went out because her feet ached so much. Having bound feet was like walking on permanently broken bones. To walk, she tottered on her heels, arms akimbo, legs stiff. For all the pain and mutilation she had undergone, her feet were still too big – at least twice the ideal of three inches. It was hard to imagine why men had ever found this to be a turn-on, until I remembered the whale-bone corset.

Until then, the only Chinese home I had been to was Chancellor Zhou’s comfortable campus residence. In comparison, the workers lived in slums. None had running water, let alone a toilet, in their home. Their single rooms had whitewashed walls, bare cement floors, no closets and windows covered not with glass but with cellophane. Their only heat came from smoky stoves that burned lumps of waste coal mixed with dust. One worker shared a bed with her husband
and
a teenaged son. She was better off than another worker: he and his wife lived in a single room with their two sons, aged twelve and fifteen. “It could be worse,” he said. “We could have had a son and a daughter.”

Another night, Erica’s master invited us home. Teacher Fu, to whom I looked to unravel the complexities of Chinese protocol, warned me there would be no food and instructed me to eat first at the factory. I did as I was told. We arrived to discover the worker had prepared a dozen dishes: fried cabbage, boiled peanuts, vine-gared sliced lotus root, noodles with a savory dark bean sauce and platters full of dumplings stuffed with minced pork, ginger and napa cabbage. Like a proper Chinese hostess, she piled the choicest
morsels on our plates. I could always eat two suppers when etiquette demanded, so I polished off the plate. As I sat back with a satisfied sigh, Erica’s master piled it high again, despite my protestations that I was truly stuffed. I politely ate everything, again. She filled my plate a third time.

Just then another worker who lived next door insisted we pay a courtesy call at
his
house. He had prepared a similar feast. I managed to force down another plateful. Erica, noticing my greenish pallor, finally leaned over and hissed, “You’re supposed to leave something on your plate!”

How was I to know that in China, a country that suffered through millennia of famine, an empty plate was a rebuke to your host, an indication that there had not been enough to eat? My mother, who had grown up in Depression-era Canada, insisted we never waste a morsel. Besides giving us the standard Western lecture about “all the starving children in China,” she had a uniquely gruesome technique guaranteed to make you eat up. Anything my siblings and I left, she served on the same dirty plate at the next meal. Until we finished the previous meal, we wouldn’t be allowed to go on to the next. Whenever we didn’t like something, we only had to imagine how even more disgusting it would taste six hours later, cold and dried out, and then we ate it up.

After several weeks, Erica and I said farewell to Master Liu’s workshop, performing a ghastly duet of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The next day, we reported for work with the foundry’s Iron Women’s Team. As lithe and leggy as a Bryn Mawr field hockey team, its seventeen members were all socialist labor heroines. They were the first females in China to take on the grueling job of blasting away the sand and metal scraps stuck to freshly cast pieces of machinery. One of the Iron Women was a slender beauty with chiseled features and an aquiline nose. Another, with her self-assured, ramrod-straight posture, reminded me of a young Katharine Hepburn. When she sang, she had perfect pitch and a haunting vibrato.

I finally understood why our dormitory had two wake-up bells: the first was for fanatics. To display their revolutionary fervor, the Iron Women started work an hour earlier than other workshops.
The first morning, we wandered bleary-eyed into their private locker room, decorated only with a proletarian pin-up calendar. Miss April, a steely-eyed beauty in a militia uniform, aimed an assault rifle at an unseen enemy. As we stepped into heavy boots, the Iron Women warned us that anything left exposed would be black with soot by the end of the day. I tucked my hair inside my denim cap and donned a surgical mask and safety goggles. I looked like a coal miner about to perform an appendectomy.

My master was a young woman my age surnamed Shi. She handed me a pneumatic drill that must have weighed sixty pounds. I’m the type who gets nervous feeding carrots into a Cuisinart.
What if I missed?
I pounded away with no discernible results at one ornery lump of steel and sand. Master Shi finally took over. Wielding her drill like it was no weightier than a mascara wand, she blasted off the sand with two well-aimed blows.

Perhaps the problem was I couldn’t see clearly. The workshop was dark. And the surgical mask fogged up my glasses. I dangled a bare lightbulb inside the freshly cast shells, but my drill kept bouncing off the target and into the bulb, which exploded in a shower of sparks and glass. By midmorning, I had destroyed half a dozen bulbs.

Over lunch, with my ears still ringing, I asked Master Shi how she had learned to use a drill. “When we first started, our wrists were so sore we couldn’t even comb our hair. But then we studied Chairman Mao’s writings on the youth movement. We overcame many difficulties. No women had ever done this work before. That’s why they call us Iron Women.”

At a pep rally the second morning, Master Shi praised me for my performance the day before. “Bright Precious Wong isn’t afraid of fatigue or dirt,” she gushed. I glowed, even though I knew I had already used up my quota of lightbulbs for the whole week.

At the Iron Women’s Team, we quit at two-thirty in the afternoon for political meetings. To pump up morale, we first sang an ode to Mao, “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman.” On the third day, we were supposed to discuss the
Communist Manifesto
. No one wanted to speak. After half an hour of awkwardness, the team leader told us we could go home.

I was surprised at how jaded the workers were. At a meeting with
the Communist Youth League, I asked my first cynical question. A young cadre had just spoken glowingly of the effectiveness of remembering-the-bitterness-of-the-past-to-savor-the-sweetness-of-the-present.

“What happens in twenty years,” I said, “when all the old people die who remember the past, and the standard of living gets better and better?” There was silence. People looked at each other. The Youth League secretary, a young woman, brightened. “People’s consciousness will get higher and higher.”

The Communist Youth League invited Erica and me to make a speech. The night before, Fu the Enforcer took us aside. She smiled at me, searching my face through her thick eyeglasses. “Remember that these young people have no idea at all what capitalism is like,” she said. “So you mustn’t give the impression that it’s good. Everything you say should be a criticism. And if you say anything positive, you should put it in the context of the bad system.”

Both Erica and I felt insulted that she questioned our revolutionary purity. Of
course
there was nothing good to say about the West. The next day, a hundred young workers listened intently as Erica talked about racism and labor strife and I spoke about Canada’s neo-colonial relationship to the U.S. It was pure radical college stuff, and when I read my diary now, I cringe.

Then someone asked how much a factory worker earned in a year. They gasped when we told them. I could feel Fu the Enforcer’s disapproving look.

Beijing in the springtime was a welcome reprieve from the harsh, dry winter. Overnight, willows along the edge of the road became tipped with the palest of tender green leaves, and the breeze was sweet with the scent of locust blossoms. One afternoon in mid-April, the entire factory shut down early for a struggle meeting. A huge black and yellow banner across a warehouse proclaimed: “A meeting to firmly attack criminal elements.” With great excitement, I joined five thousand other workers sitting outdoors on little folding stools. After a brief wait, security guards led out three men, yanking them by their clothing. An emcee shouted, “Down with criminal elements! Firmly attack the criminal elements!” People
around me half-heartedly joined in, but some didn’t even bother to look up.