Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (17 page)

Obeying Mao’s exhortations, the Red Guards had flooded into the countryside in the first flush of the Cultural Revolution. But as time passed, they felt betrayed. The most disaffected formed gangs, practiced martial arts and raised vicious dogs. The youth gangs roamed the countryside, terrorizing peasants. Part of Fragrance’s job as Youth League secretary was to organize dog-beating squads. I could picture her kicking dogs. She certainly made it refreshingly clear that rooming with me was a cross she had to bear. Like my old roommate, Scarlet, Fragrance rose before dawn to dust and mop, and even tried to wash my sheets when I was out. But I had learned my lesson. I retaliated by washing
her
laundry, and she finally gave up.

After my experience at the Number One Machine Tool Factory, I should have known lathe operating didn’t do much for one’s world outlook. After seven years at it, Deng Xiaoping lost little time embarking on the capitalist road. One of the first things he did when he returned to power in 1973 was reinstate university entrance exams. A former Red Guard toiling in the countryside promptly derailed those plans. Zhang Tiesheng showed up late for the test and scrawled across the top: “Life is too hard in the countryside — I had no time to prepare for the exams.” Defiantly, he handed in a blank paper. Madame Mao, Deng’s fiercest rival, dubbed Zhang a hero. The newly revived exam system bit the dust.

As a result, my thirty-six Chinese classmates got into the best university in the country on the strength of “recommendations from the masses.” My classmates ranged in age from late teens to early thirties. Some were semi-literate. Others had finished junior high school. About half were the offspring of Beijing officials. Many were of genuine peasant and worker stock. One classmate’s father stoked our boilers on campus. The rest included eight soldiers and four members of China’s national minorities. Without objective standards like entrance exams or even high-school graduation marks – almost none had finished high school because of the Cultural Revolution — connections inevitably helped. One boy’s father was a general. Another was the top recruiter for the Beijing Military Region. Still another headed the Communist Party Organization Department in Guizhou province.

Normally only unmarried people could enroll in university, so all my classmates were single, with three exceptions. At twenty-seven, for instance, Fragrance had already rejected several arranged marriages her parents tried to foist on her.

“I’ve decided to get married when I’m thirty,” she told me.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“No. But when I’m thirty, I’ll go out and find one,” she said with finality, ending the conversation.

Dating was strictly forbidden, but that didn’t stop Fragrance from surveying the field. In our class, where the ratio of males to females was a favorable two to one, she quietly set her sights on a PLA soldier with a slight stutter and the right demographics. He was from a poor peasant family in Fragrance’s home province of Shaanxi and he, too, was a Communist Party member. At one point, he studied so hard he had a nervous breakdown. A buxom peasant from Sichuan competed with Fragrance to wipe his fevered brow, bring him hot meals and wash his socks. By the time he got better, it was clear that the soldier preferred the Sichuanese. Fragrance retreated in defeat but stuck to her game plan. After graduation, she married a worker-peasant-soldier student from her hometown.

If Chinese students couldn’t date one another, there was an even greater taboo on liaisons with foreigners. During the entire xenophobic 1970s, the handful of marriages between Chinese and foreigners had to be personally approved by Premier Zhou Enlai himself. I developed a crush on Ma Li, a Communist Party soldier-student with flashing eyes and a quick wit. He and another PLA classmate spent a Sunday morning repairing my steamer trunk, which had been damaged in transit. I poured them endless cups of green tea while admiring their biceps as they hammered and tightened screws.

If I was naive, Ma Li, whose name literally meant Horsepower, had few illusions. Had he gotten involved with me, he would have been expelled from school, kicked out of the Party, dishonorably discharged
and
sent to Chinese Siberia. He restricted our contact to pick-up games of basketball. We held hands only when I challenged him — and my other soldier classmates — to left-handed arm-wrestling contests. (I always won.)

When two of our classmates conducted a clandestine affair, punishment was swift. Our class president, another PLA soldier, promised to help a female classmate join the Party if she slept with him. She did, but when he refused to marry her – and she discovered he was already betrothed to the daughter of his commander back in the provinces – she was so enraged she reported him to the Party Committee. He was expelled, and she received a permanent black mark in her dossier.

In January 1975, Chairman Mao promoted Deng Xiaoping to vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, chief of staff of the PLA, vice-chairman of the Central Committee
and
standing member of the powerful Politburo. At the same time, Mao gave his wife the green light to launch a hard-line campaign against Deng. Mao wasn’t schizophrenic. He had read the
Art of War
, the third-century B.C. classic by Sun Zi, and was merely playing off one side against the other.

On campus, the new campaign’s fallout was immediate. A university official made a four-hour speech about an obscure school in northeast China. Chaoyang (Facing-the-Sun) Agricultural Institute had canceled classes and sent its students to farm barren land. “The question for Beijing University is, how can
we
learn from the revolutionary experience of Facing-the-Sun Agricultural College?” the official said. He paused dramatically. “The answer is simple. We already have a farm of our own.”

Mao’s dictum “Oppose book worship” was going to be taken literally. Big Character posters went up overnight. I had trouble deciphering the brush-stroke calligraphy — very different from printed Chinese – so Fragrance read them aloud while I took notes. “Our teachers want us to be important big-city editors while what is needed are propaganda workers to go to the lowest levels,” complained one poster put up by students in the journalism department. Another accused teachers of denigrating the time language students spent at factories and farms. “The new intellectuals must be able to wield a hoe as well as a pen,” the poster declared.

The next day, Horsepower and a Communist Party official named Pan Qingde paid me a surprise visit.

“Why were you reading the Big Character posters?” Party Secretary Pan demanded. “Do you think the campus is in chaos?”

“No” I said earnestly. “Big Character posters are good. They show that China is democratic, that people can say what they think.”

“Why were you taking notes?” he asked.

I looked at Horsepower for help, but he studied the floor. “I can’t remember anything unless I write it down,” I said lamely.

Pan was our class Communist Party secretary, a salaried job that involved molding us into hard-line Maoists. He was a bit older than we were, a recent graduate of the first class of worker-peasant-soldier students. At first I liked him. He was a peasant from Manchuria, lean and muscular, with strong white teeth, an earnest gaze and a ready smile. But over time, I realized that Party Secretary Pan was a male version of Fu the Enforcer. He was both ignorant and despotic, the kind of cadre everybody hated. His name, Qingde, meant Celebrating Virtue. After many run-ins with him, my classmates secretly nicknamed him Pan Quede, or Lacking Virtue Pan, a classic Confucian put-down.

“I am a peasant,” he once boasted at a meeting. “I have no skills. I’m not smart at my studies. My political consciousness isn’t high. But there is one thing I do well. I loyally, fervently obey the Party’s orders.”

Our classes were canceled for a full week so we could debate how to emulate Facing-the-Sun Agricultural Institute. A Party official spoke first, reminding us that only 4 or 5 percent of young people had a chance at a college education. Someone else said that seven peasants had to toil full time to cover the expenses of just one student. I personally was all for hard labor in the countryside. Coming from the West in the 1970s when everyone was questioning the intrinsic value of exams and grades, I saw China as daringly progressive. I thought work-study would be a great way to teach young people about their society.

To my surprise, more than half my class balked. “What’s the point of reforming, reforming, reforming!” a student exploded in frustration at one meeting. “I’ve worked as hard as anyone. I’ve already spent five years in the countryside. When am I ever going to be reformed? I’m supposed to be studying now.” While I was naive, my
classmates knew that the Movement to Learn from Facing-the-Sun was a well-orchestrated campaign. They also knew, with a sense of impending doom, that no matter how the debate wound up, we, too, were going to the countryside.

In early March 1975, seven departments, including mine, were ordered down to Daxing (Big Joy), the university’s farm. The goal of the program – grandly called “half-work, half-study” – was both thought reform and economic self-sufficiency. My classmates despaired. After losing so many years to the Cultural Revolution, they didn’t want to waste another moment. Our three-year undergraduate degree was already a year short of the traditional program. Now, after a mere five months at university, they were going to be peasants. I watched Fragrance brood. She looked mad enough to punch someone.

I was upset, too, but for the opposite reason. The school announced that foreign students would stay on campus and attend private lectures, much to the relief of the Japanese, Romanian and Ugandan in my class. Unlike me, the other three foreign students had no desire to dirty their hands. Undaunted, I launched a one-woman campaign to go to the farm. Using my by-now large Maoist vocabulary, I wrote passionate letters to the Foreign Students Office, the history department chairman and the Communist Party secretary of the university. My missives fell on deaf ears, but bursting into tears at one or two strategic moments brought grown men to their knees. Forty-eight hours before my class was to leave, Beijing University gave me the green light. Once I set the precedent, my hapless foreign classmates had to go, too. They didn’t dare say they didn’t want to go, because they were afraid everyone would think they were hopelessly bourgeois, which, of course, everyone thought anyway.

Masochistic Maoism meant no gain without pain. Someone decided we had to
hike
the thirty miles to Big Joy Farm, supposedly to emulate the Red Army’s epic Long March of 1934–35. To increase the hardship quotient, the school announced that we would walk at night. On March 20, 1975, Fragrance and I fortified ourselves with a lavish lunch at the appropriately named Long March Restaurant
across from the campus. We washed down a double order of sweet-and-sour pork with cups of
bai jiu
, the 120-proof sorghum-based liquor. Then we staggered red-faced back to our dorm, popped a couple of sleeping pills and slept off our excesses.

We awoke that evening with raging hangovers. After a gala, head-splitting send-off, complete with firecrackers, drums and speeches, we marched out the school gates, three abreast, behind a fluttering red flag. By midnight, my headache had disappeared. To boost morale, we sang revolutionary songs. Chinese literature majors, in charge of “propaganda,” stood by the side of the road performing rap-like comic dialogues to the rhythmic clack of bamboo clappers.

Every two hours, we stopped for a break. Sitting in the cool darkness, we munched cold sausage and sweet bread and smoked terrible Albanian cigarettes. My soldier classmates passed around their canteens of rotgut, and we all took swigs. Periodically, my professors urged me to ride the bus that trailed behind us to catch the weak and the faint. I was exhausted, but after all my whining, the loss of face would have been too great. At 3:30 a.m., Fragrance and a teacher tried to drag me onto the bus. I didn’t have the energy to resist, so I resorted to my now-hackneyed weapon. As my eyes filled with tears, they dropped my arms instantly. No one ever mentioned the bus again.

The last seven miles were the hardest. A few students cried. Some gave up and took the bus. Others, with bloody socks from broken blisters, hobbled painfully along. Fragrance and I were fine because I had sprinkled Johnson’s Baby Powder on our feet before we left. Whenever we felt ourselves flagging, we shouted Mao quotations like “Be resolute! Fear not martyrdom! Surmount ten thousand obstacles to win victory!” At dawn, after an eleven-hour march, we staggered into Big Joy Farm. An advance team had already laid out our quilts and poured mugs of cool boiled water for us. We washed our blistered feet in basins of warm water, downed a quick breakfast of salted pickles and steamed buns and went to sleep, not waking until late that afternoon.

That first evening, my class gathered in a military tent to summarize our thoughts. I got up to speak. “I’m so happy to be allowed to take part in this great work-study experiment,” I gushed.
“Perhaps one day, as Marx predicted, we will eliminate the gap between mental and manual labor. Perhaps we eventually will create the conditions where everyone who wants to can go to university.” I must have been the only starry-eyed person in the tent. My Chinese classmates knew we were wasting precious time that should have been spent in the library and lecture halls.

Our first task at Big Joy was to dig latrines for the men. They were primitive, but at least they were open-air. The women’s toilets, a line of concrete slits in an adobe hut, reeked with accumulated ammonia gases that burned my eyes. The revolting task of bailing out the toilets was assigned to Big Joy’s resident counterrevolutionaries. We met them at a Communist version of the Welcome Wagon.

On our second evening there, Big Joy hosted a class-struggle meeting to introduce the counter-revolutionaries to the newcomers. Marx forbid that we might smile at one by mistake. We sat on folding stools in a dirt clearing that doubled as our basketball court. The first counter-revolutionary was a history professor in his fifties named Yuan Liangyi. Someone yanked off his cloth cap so we could see him clearly (and remember his face for future glares). He was unshaven and wore dirty patched clothes. He blinked nervously through lopsided yellowing plastic glasses.