Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (18 page)

Professor Yuan was a grandson of Yuan Shikai, the infamous general who tried to subvert the fledgling republic in 1916 by crowning himself emperor, a “reign” that lasted just three months. Professor Yuans crime was joining Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang Party, which lost the civil war to the Communists in 1949. Accused of “continuing his reactionary activities, especially in his teaching,” Professor Yuan was sent to Big Joy Farm for hard labor. He had escaped the previous spring and wandered through central China until he was caught in Zhengzhou, more than six hundred miles away. I often saw him walking around Big Joy, his eyes downcast. He might as well have been in solitary confinement. No one ever spoke to him.

Professor Yuan cringed as various students, including Horsepower, read out denunciations. As each accuser’s voice rose to a high-pitched frenzy, two people at a side microphone led the
audience in chanting slogans. “Down with the counter-revolutionary element Yuan Liangyi!” Everyone joined in. I felt self-conscious. How could anyone shout such ridiculous phrases and keep a straight face? But remaining silent was a political statement, too. Hadn’t I nagged them to let me take part in political study? As I stared at Professor Yuans ashen face, I was fascinated and repelled and a little afraid. I wondered about the fine line dividing him from us. We were all living on the same farm, doing the same backbreaking labor, eating the same terrible food. He had to reform his thoughts. So did we. What was the big difference?

The emcee interrupted my musings by announcing that another counter-revolutionary was a con artist. Xiao Yinong, a student in the Chinese literature department, had passed himself off as the son of Xiao Daosheng, the deputy Party secretary of Jilin province, which bordered North Korea and the Soviet Union. Xiao Yinong’s real father was a counter-revolutionary, but in a system where class background was paramount, the only way Xiao could change his lot in life was to reinvent himself. He managed to charm everyone for a long time, including a clerk at the Dang An Chu, the powerful dossier register that maintained lifelong files on all Chinese. Incredibly, he managed to doctor his own dossier.

As Party Secretary Xiao’s son, he was able to get into Beijing University. There, he impressed everyone by casually offering to pick up friends in government sedans. No one minded when he phoned at the last minute to explain the cars were needed on urgent business. He told classmates he was due to tour the United States. They nodded understandingly when his trip was canceled because of increasing Sino-US. tensions. Beautiful women chased him. Officials wined and dined him. But his elaborate fraud began unraveling when someone asked Party Secretary Xiao about his illustrious son.

“I have no son at Beijing University,” the Party secretary harrumphed.

Xiao Yinong coolly replied that his mother had been a private nurse to Party Secretary Xiao and that he was their bastard son. “Of course,” Xiao Yinong said, “he would deny the relationship.”

Finally, though, he was caught. He stood stoically as his former
classmates read out denunciations. Just as I didn’t understand what was so wrong about selling ration tickets, I actually found it funny that Xiao had managed to fool so many for so long. But something about the scenario bothered me, too. I had seen the curtained limousines. I had eaten the New Year’s feast at Chancellor Zhou’s home, cooked by a servant. But I had no idea there was an entire organized system of privilege. The official propaganda, which I was only just beginning to question, urged Party members to “combat privilege” and “unite with the masses.”

By the late 1970s, during a period of relative openness following Mao’s death, a drama titled
What if I Were Real?
played to packed houses in Beijing and other cities. Based on the true story of a youth who had pulled a similar con job, the protagonist’s last line, as police led him away, was: “What if I were real?” Audiences loved the play because it asked why the proletariat should be arrested for enjoying the same privileges as the Party elite. Was the real crime fraud, or influence peddling? Xiao Yinong survived his ordeal at Big Joy Farm and, by putting his fertile imagination to work, eventually became a famous novelist in China.

At Big Joy Farm, we seemed to be surrounded by counterrevolutionaries. Next door was the Paradise River Labor Reform Camp for petty thieves. On walks, I stared from afar at the inmates, their heads shaved, in dark blue prison uniforms. I was told never to talk to them. “They are full of hatred for society,” warned one of my teachers. But when I saw them toiling in the fields, I wondered again what the big difference was between us and them.

We had arrived just in time for the spring dust storms. At the first gust, choking clouds of fine yellow Gobi Desert sand, blown all the way from Mongolia, coated everything — our beds, our shoes, our dishes. My teeth felt gritty. I had to shake out my diary before I could write. Ten minutes after I shampooed, my hair was dirty again. I gave up wearing my contact lenses.

My class was organized, military style, into three squads, each headed by a PLA classmate. We slept in shacks or khaki tents on bunk beds, ten to a room. Our lighting was a single fluorescent strip. We had no chairs or desks or even a shelf for our rice bowls. At 6 a.m.,
when reveille sounded, everyone pitched in to do the chores. Someone swept the floor, while others polished the windows with old newspapers, fetched buckets of cold water from an outdoor tap or lugged thermoses of boiling water for tea. At night, we poured half a bottle of pesticide into a washbasin, diluted it with water, and sprinkled it with our bare hands over the floors and walls until our room reeked. I watched the mosquitoes die in mid-flight and tried not to think what it was doing to my descendants.

Everyone’s appetites had increased dramatically. At mealtimes, each squad carried galvanized steel buckets of rice and the stir-fried slop
du jour back
from the collective kitchen and dished it out at our dorms. There was never enough food to go around. At lunch, I had to hunt through my portion of cabbage to find the postage-sized scrap of pork fat, with the skin and coarse black hairs still attached. It was my daily protein, and after a while I even found it delicious. To drown out the taste of the stale cabbage, I adopted my classmates’ habit of munching cloves of raw garlic and sprinkling hot chili powder over my rice. At night when hunger kept me from sleeping, I relied on a cache of Chinese caramels to still the rumblings in my stomach. After several months of inadequate rations, my classmates finally complained to authorities. It turned out that we
were
being underfed; a canteen worker had been embezzling our food money.

I began to dream about food – fresh peach pie, strawberry shortcake, greasy french fries and T-bone steaks slathered in a cognac and black pepper sauce. Once, I had a rare chance to go back to the city. I stopped at the Long March Restaurant and got a double order of sweet-and-sour pork, which I packed into an aluminum lunch box. When I got back to Big Joy, Fragrance and I sneaked behind our dormitory and devoured the cold, soggy mess, feeling as guilty as escaped convicts from the Paradise River Labor Reform Camp.

It wasn’t enough that we had abandoned our classrooms and were toiling in the fields. As part of the Revolution in Education, Mao’s radical lieutenants ordered us to write our own textbooks. Even I would be expected to write a chapter, although I still had trouble reading and writing Chinese. My classmates reacted to this latest project with dismay. Only one or two could read original
source material in classical Chinese, as different from modern Chinese as Latin is from English. One teacher set the official tone: Mao Zedong Thought would help us conquer all.

“You are the revolutionary pioneers,” he told us. “In the past, only the most eminent professors revised material. They would retreat to some scenic site and live in luxury hotels while they wrote in grand isolation. What you are doing is a
xinsheng shiwu
, a New-Born Thing. You will farm by day and rewrite history by night.” Our deadline for this project? A mere fifty days, including our time in the fields. For my chapter, I chose the Taiping Rebellion, a massive peasant uprising with neo-Christian roots that lasted from 1851 to 1864 and resulted in 20 million deaths. As “research materials,” we relied on a recently published set of simplistic monographs, heavy on rhetoric and light on facts.

Our professors were supposed to be ideologically bankrupt. The more book learning they had, the more polluted their thinking. In contrast, we were pure. Our ignorance was a virtue. To ensure the textbook would have the correct revolutionary spin, we would show our draft not to our teachers but to the local peasants, the motherlode of political correctness.

Many of our professors hadn’t been with their families for years. After long stints of thought-reforming labor at the start of the Cultural Revolution, they now had to accompany us to Big Joy. We weren’t especially appreciative. One elderly scholar came in for particular scorn. “Professor Fan pays attention to the brighter students and ignores those of us with primary educations,” complained one of my classmates at an organized criticism session. Someone else accused Professor Fan of looking down on peasant students. “He secretly makes fun of their accents,” she said angrily.

Our teachers couldn’t win. When they emphasized manual labor, a Big Character poster accused them of neglecting our academic studies, thereby sabotaging the half-work, half-study experiment. When Professor Fan praised his students for studying past midnight, a student said, “Such habits are detrimental to the health of worker-peasant-soldier students.”

In May, Beijing University chose the six brightest students in my
class to attend a meeting of five universities on textbook rewriting. Not one of the chosen was a female, a peasant or a worker. My classmates were furious. At dawn the next day, Party Secretary Pan called an emergency meeting and laid out the ground rules. “We will not discuss who should be sent, but whether the correct line in education has been carried out,” he said. We hurriedly washed our faces and gathered in one of the tents. Horsepower hadn’t been chosen, and was smarting. He raised his hand first and accused our teachers of being obsessed with image. “Beijing University is afraid of losing its big-name reputation if it doesn’t send its most brilliant students,” he said, as everyone nodded. “The teachers are afraid that sending average students will reflect badly on them.”

A peasant classmate remarked poignantly that, even if he were picked, “I wouldn’t dare go.” Yet another said that the chance to attend such a conference was a learning experience. If the best students were always picked, the gap between them and the poorer students would widen. “We’re like an army unit. Not one foot soldier must be left behind,” the student said.

A female classmate weighed in. “The standards of the class must be raised together. Every time a selection is made, I can’t help but think, ‘Are there any peasants among them?’ ” In the end, the same six students went to the seminar. Even the Revolution in Education had its limits.

We nicknamed our experiment Tent University. At first, we had classes in tents for half a day, then toiled the other half. But under Madame Mao’s hard-line influence, half-work, half-study soon became all work and no study. Sixteen days after we arrived, we abandoned our classes completely.

School officials decided that Big Joy Farm was such a great idea it should become a permanent fixture of university life. They ordered us to build real housing for next year’s freshman class. In fifteen years, they confidently predicted, Beijing University would be self-sufficient in rice, meat and vegetables. Who would have guessed that by then, even the peasants would be fleeing their farms?

Overnight, we became full-time construction workers. When the reveille blasted over the loudspeakers, we jumped out of bed,
rolled up our padded quilts and ran to the latrine. After a quick breakfast of salted vegetables and cornmeal mush, we began sifting sand and gravel, mixing concrete, clearing land, digging foundations, unloading bricks and moving rocks. We had no machines. Like ants, a dozen of us dragged slabs of prefabricated concrete with our bare hands. We hauled loads of dirt in rusty single-wheeled carts that were devilishly hard to balance. Many times, I spilled my load, and then my weary classmates had to shovel the dirt all over again. We transported bricks in baskets suspended, coolie-style, from bamboo shoulder poles. Using an old tree stump, we pounded the dirt floors smooth. Peasant carpenters helped us install the windows and doors.

Classmates who weren’t very good academically restored some of their self-esteem by out-performing everyone else at manual labor. During the noon siesta, one peasant student always swept the yard and even washed his classmates’ socks. My left-handedness, until then a badge of my Western penchant for female domination, became a valuable asset. I became the chief bricklayer for the right sides of all the doors, windows and corners. After a day of hard labor, my arms shook so badly at supper I couldn’t hold my spoon to eat.

After twenty-three days of grueling work, we finished building two rows of simple brick dormitories. We planted poplar saplings in front, then set up concrete slabs under them for al fresco dining. I don’t think any palace ever looked so beautiful. By May, the dust storms subsided. My classmates, I thought, were accepting me as an equal for the first time. I joined the propaganda troupe as a flautist, taught my classmates to square dance and cajoled my female classmates into forming a basketball team. During one momentary lapse of sanity, I signed up for the broad jump at an athletic tournament, and placed sixth.

I was allowed to participate in everything except Party meetings, which were restricted to members. One afternoon, I attended the “rehabilitation” of the “most stubborn rightist” in Beijing University’s history. The son of a landlord, he had enrolled in the history department in 1951, said something wrong — exactly what
was not made clear — and had never been allowed to graduate. Now, after eighteen years of forced labor, he was deemed to have finally reformed himself. With a flourish, a school official announced that he would finally be allowed to graduate. My classmates guffawed at the idea that someone in his fifties was getting a diploma. I was shocked that an imprudent comment was enough to ruin his life.