Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (21 page)

With Norman, soon after our “marriage,” in front of the Double-Happiness symbols on the whitewashed wall of our room at the Foreign Languages Press
.

A
n English professor named Zheng Peidi, afraid her English would get rusty, approached me at Big Joy Farm. I was thrilled to talk to anyone who dared talk to me; many of my classmates still kept their distance in this era of xenophobia. We soon became good friends.

Like many who studied a Western language, Zheng Peidi had adopted a foreign name, Betty. Slender and vivacious and in her early thirties, she was one of the most relaxed, self-assured Chinese I had ever met. Her father was chief engineer of the Beijing Public Works Department. A great-uncle was Taiwan’s defense minister, and his son later married Chiang Kai-shek’s granddaughter. Her mother’s cousin had been a Central Committee member and mayor of Tianjin, the third-largest city; his wife was vice-mayor of Beijing
and
editor-in-chief of the
People’s Daily
, the official Party mouthpiece. But the most interesting connection of all was that this same cousin had romanced an aspiring starlet named Jiang Qing, long before she became Mao’s third wife.

Betty attended the best girls’ school in the capital, the Beijing Normal University’s Girls’ Middle School, where her schoolmates included Mao’s two daughters. “Li Min was very quiet and gentle, with waist-length braids. Li Na was a tomboy, tall and arrogant,”
Betty recalled. “They had Mao’s features. Both were smart and hardworking, and they always dressed simply. Li Min even wore patched clothes. They were very sensitive about who they were. They never took a private car to school, always public buses. In those days it was safe for them to travel that way.”

At Beijing University, Betty studied English literature and picked up a British accent from rooming for a year with Bonnie McDougall, a sinologist who coincidentally later married my Swedish friend Anders Hansson. When Betty subsequently moved back to a Chinese dormitory, she regaled her roommates with late-night tales about the love affair her mother’s dashing cousin once had. Four years later, when the Cultural Revolution began, one of the roommates ended up in the same radical faction as Teacher Dai and Fu the Enforcer. The roommate remembered the gossip and accused Betty of launching a “counter-revolutionary attack on Comrade Jiang Qing.”

That faction’s Red Guards arrested Betty, by then a professor in the English department, and locked her up in an empty classroom, dubbed a cowshed because it held “cow-devil and snake-spirit counter-revolutionaries.” Betty had just given birth to her first child, and she begged the Red Guards to let her return home to nurse him. “They refused, and gave me an injection to dry up my milk,” she recalled. “I was in agony for several days. My breasts were hard with milk. They felt like rocks. I was in terrible pain.”

The Red Guards beat her with sticks and ordered her to confess. They wanted her to retract her scandalous story. Betty rashly decided truth was the best defense. She dredged up every explicit detail she could remember. She told them that her mother’s cousin, Yu Qiwei, first met Jiang Qing in 1933, when he was a hero of the Communist-led student movement and she was a twenty-year-old librarian and wannabe film starlet. Yu not only initiated Jiang Qing into love but approved her application to join the Communist Party. When he was arrested a year later, his powerful uncle, Yu Ta-wei, the one destined to become Taiwan’s defense minister, bailed him out. After the Communist victory, Yu Qiwei changed his name to Huang Jing. He died in 1958 at the age of forty-six, apparently of heart disease. If he was long dead and all this happened before
Jiang Qing met Mao, Betty reasoned, what was all the fuss about?

The Red Guards didn’t see it that way. The Maoist personality cult required that Comrade Jiang Qing be pure as jade. For the next one hundred days, Betty remained in the cowshed. Her mother-in-law fed the baby rice gruel. Betty’s husband, who was working in Tibet as an army translator, managed to get back to Beijing once. In his military uniform, a sign of political reliability during the Cultural Revolution, he strode purposefully past the Red Guards and found Betty sitting on the concrete floor among the other prisoners. When their whispers aroused suspicions, he thrust a book of Mao’s quotations at her and said loudly, “Make sure you study this.” Then he left. There was nothing he could do.

When Betty’s brother protested her treatment, the Red Guards locked him up, then exiled him to Sichuan province in the southwest. They jailed her mother, then forced her to clean office toilets for a year before sending her off to Henan province in central China. Betty’s father was put under house arrest after his driver accused him of preferring American can openers. As part of his punishment, her father had to scrub the front steps of the Department of Public Works with a toothbrush.

In the cowshed, Betty was the youngest and the lowest ranking of the approximately one hundred prisoners, who all slept together on the concrete floor. The others were all top Party officials and scholars, including Chancellor Zhou. “I felt quite out of place,” she recalled. Years later, after the cowshed alumni regained power, they remained friends.

But not all survived. Every morning, the Red Guards forced the prisoners to play an insane version of Trivial Pursuit. Each Mao quotation was assigned a number. When the Red Guards barked out a number, the inmates had to shout back the correct quotation. “Luckily I was young and had a very good memory,” said Betty. “But the older professors stumbled. The Red Guards beat them with whips and bicycle chains. One professor was beaten every day until he died.”

In 1970, just as her husband was demobilized, Betty was sent to Beijing University’s Carp Island Farm. She was supposed to toil under the supervision of the faction persecuting her, which included
Fu the Enforcer. But despite her political handicap, Betty soon won a coveted slot on the farm’s propaganda team. “Fu Min was jealous because I didn’t have to do any work on rehearsal days, and because my skin was so fair,” said Betty.
“Her
nickname was Old Blackie because she tanned so easily.”

At Carp Island, people knew Betty had committed a crime that was literally unspeakable. A few bold ones inquired discreetly, but she was too frightened to tell them. Shunned by nearly everyone, Betty was heartened when a young lab assistant sometimes smiled at her. Eventually, she confided in him. “I thought it was much worse,” he said, shocked. “Everyone knows that Jiang Qing had many lovers. I can’t believe you’re in so much trouble for saying that.”

Betty felt happier than she had in a long time. He was the first person who had spoken kindly to her in more than two years. In a bitter sea of betrayal, they became fast friends.

It was Fu the Enforcer’s turn for guard duty. She hadn’t found any class enemies, but late that night when she returned, hot and sticky, from routine patrol, she noticed that Betty was not in her bed. Her suspicions aroused, she went out to hunt for her. She found Betty and the young lab assistant sitting side by side on the riverbank. Fu the Enforcer rushed to report the juicy news to the army representative in charge.

“We were just chatting,” Betty told me many years later. “She added soy sauce and vinegar, and started a rumor that I was having an affair with a younger man.” The army representative interrogated Betty, who denied any wrongdoing. He didn’t believe her. “Those who make political mistakes are doomed to mess up their personal lives,” he said. Fu the Enforcer gloated.

“She called me a
po xie”
said Betty, using Chinese slang for a whore, literally a broken shoe, worn out from so many feet trying it on. Betty, who had already weathered two years of Red Guard beatings, was defiant. But the young man went to pieces. “He was really scared. He was a bachelor. He thought he would never be able to get married after that,” she said. Under interrogation, he denounced Betty for “taking the initiative.” She was furious.

She saw the young man only once or twice after that. On September 13, 1971, he followed her out the campus gates, his face partly hidden by a surgical mask that Beijingers don during dust storms. “Lin Biao has just died in a plane crash,” he whispered. “He was trying to flee the country.”

Betty recoiled in fear. Mao’s heir apparent? His closest comrade-in-arms? She biked home and told her husband. At first he, too, was disbelieving. Then he was elated. The young man came from a well-connected military family; Betty’s husband figured he felt guilty about betraying her and hoped the news would help reverse her case. Madame Mao and Lin Biao were allies. If Lin Biao fell, could she be far behind? Marshal Lin Biao, who once extolled Mao as a genius, had indeed died less than twenty-four hours earlier when his plane crashed in Outer Mongolia. Ordinary Chinese wouldn’t learn about the stunning event for months. But despite Lin Biao’s literal fall from grace, Madame Mao would remain in power for five more years.

Who became a victim and who became a tormentor during the Cultural Revolution seemed completely random. People who knew something was true might still end up persecuting the person who made the mistake of saying it out loud. Teacher Dai, who knew Betty from high school, told me, “It’s such a pity what happened to Betty. In fact, Fu Min and I knew the same stuff about Jiang Qing, but nothing happened to us. I said to Fu Min recently, ‘Luckily neither of us betrayed the other.’ ”

When Betty finally was reunited with her three-year-old son, he no longer recognized her, for which she blamed herself. Her love of gossip had devastated her entire family. In 1971, she gave birth to her second child and named her Na, or Silence. Betty hoped her daughter would learn to keep her mouth shut.

Like many Chinese dislocated by the Cultural Revolution, Betty and her husband counted their time together in days and weeks, not years. They had already been separated for eight years while he served in Tibet and she was in the cowshed. After he was demobilized, he was assigned work as an English translator at
China Reconstructs
, a propaganda monthly aimed at foreigners. Just as Betty returned from Carp Island,
China Reconstructs
ordered her husband
to do hard labor on a farm in Hebei province. By 1975, he had returned, but by then Betty had to go to Big Joy Farm with her students.

We were sitting under the poplar saplings that my class had planted when she told me about their long separations. She sighed. Then I sighed. I was lonely, too, I said. She glanced sideways at me. “I know a very good American comrade,” she said. “He works with my husband.” She told me the American had refused to accept the perks reserved for foreigners and fought to get the same low pay as other Chinese. His name was Norman, she said – and I realized I had met him at a party eight months earlier.

I thought Norman Shulman was Chinese the first time I met him. At a Merry Marxmas party thrown by a fellow Canadian Maoist on New Year’s Day, 1975, I noticed a pathetic figure huddled against the radiator. He was wearing a padded Mao suit with a faded cap pulled low over his yellowing, plastic-frame glasses. He had a lot of stubble on his chin, but back then many Chinese men didn’t shave for days for lack of decent razor blades. The Mao cap camouflaged his Big Nose and hid a shiny pate encircled by curly brown hair. I spoke to him in Chinese, and he replied with a flawless accent. Only when someone else joined us, and he broke into fluent English, did I realize he was a foreigner. Norman, in hindsight, did not look remotely Chinese, but then I had not yet honed my journalistic powers of observation.

Norman was the only Vietnam War draft dodger to take refuge in China. In those days, Washington banned Americans from traveling to Communist countries. For its part, China normally refused visas to Americans. But because his father was already working in Beijing, Norman was granted a Chinese visa. After a circuitous journey from New York to London, Karachi, Colombo, Dhaka and Canton, he arrived in Beijing in February 1966, at the age of twenty-two. He might as well have gone to Vietnam. By the time I met him nine years later, he looked as if he had just gotten out of a Viet Cong prisoner-of-war camp. Years of Chinese canteen dining had pared his wrists and ankles to the size of mailing tubes. And speaking of prisons, he was now marooned in China. His U.S. passport
had expired long ago, and he was under indictment back home for dodging the draft.

Both sets of his Jewish grandparents had fled the pogroms of czarist Russia, settling in Rochester, New York, and New York’s Lower East Side. His parents, both card-carrying members of the Communist Party U.S.A., eventually quit the Party. They divorced when Norman was four. During the Sino-Soviet dispute, Jack Shulman sided with Beijing and in 1965 moved to China with his third wife, Ruth. There he worked as a propaganda-text polisher at Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, and she taught English at Beijing’s Institute of International Relations, a school that secretly trained spies. When Norman arrived, his father picked the Chinese name Shu Yulu for him after some model Party secretary then being extolled in the
People’s Daily
. Yulu literally meant Fat Paycheck, an ironic moniker for someone who insisted on being paid as badly as his Chinese colleagues.

Strangely, many foreigners living in China, even those who resided there for decades, never learned to speak more than pidgin Chinese. One reason was the difficulty of the tonal language. Another reason was that China generally refused to provide tutors. Instead it made it very easy for foreigners to avoid speaking Chinese, supplying them with free interpreters and restricting their jobs to language teaching or text editing. Keeping foreigners ignorant and dependent was an ancient barbarian-control policy. The Qing dynasty caved in to Western demands that it rescind a ban on language lessons only after it lost the 1840 Opium War.

Norman, who had been a software programmer in New York, hoped to help develop China’s non-existent computer industry. Although he abhorred teaching and text polishing, he had a talent for languages and already spoke Spanish and some Portuguese. Determined to learn Chinese systematically, he had enrolled at the Beijing Language Institute. Before the school shut down for the Cultural Revolution, he managed to squeeze in two and a half years of lessons. He could read and write, and became one of the best Chinese speakers in Beijing’s foreign community.