China in Ten Words, page 14
One of those roaming Red Guards was the older brother of a classmate of mine. By this time the brother had been relocated to a rural village, where he endured a life of back-breaking toil. Every couple of months he would walk five or six hours to get back to our town, and a few days later walk another five or six hours back to a village where the only nighttime lighting came from kerosene lamps. His home visits were holiday occasions for us younger children, and listening to his stories on those summer evenings was a cherished pleasure.
As the heat receded at the end of the day, he would sit back in a rattan chair, his right foot resting on his left knee and a palm-leaf fan in his hand. Soon a dozen or more admirers would park themselves on the ground in front of him, and he would travel back in time to that morning when he and his comrades had raised their red banners and marched majestically out of our little town, their Red Guard armbands gleaming. They planned to march five hundred miles to Shaoshan, in Hunan, where they would pay homage at Mao Zedong’s ancestral home, then march another five hundred miles to Mao’s earliest revolutionary base area, the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi. But they wore themselves out just on the first day’s march, so instead they flagged a truck down and rode in the back as far as Shanghai, fifty miles away. After touring Shanghai for a good ten days or so, they took a train to Beijing, where they did more sightseeing, and then divided into two groups, one boarding the train to Qingdao, the other traveling south to Wuhan. Over time their numbers dwindled, and in the end my classmate’s brother constituted a team of one. He traveled by himself to Guangzhou, where he ran into Red Guards from Shenyang, in the northeast, and in their company crossed the strait to Hainan Island. Six months later, he and his Red Guard associates, like soldiers separated in battle, straggled back to our town one by one. Exchanging notes about their respective networking activities, they realized that not one of them had made it to Shaoshan or the Jinggang Mountains. They had gone only to major cities and famous tourist destinations, and in the name of the revolution had accomplished the longest and most enjoyable sightseeing excursion of their entire lives. The story always ended with a stirring refrain: “Ah, our beautiful rivers and mountains—I saw them all, you know!”
By that time the Red Guard veterans from our town had been banished to the countryside and were living in wretched conditions. After the chaos and turmoil of the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong was confronted by a harsh reality: for three years after 1966, high schools and universities had admitted no new students, creating a backlog of more than 16 million middle school and high school graduates awaiting further education or employment. Although society had become relatively more stable, China’s economy was on the verge of bankruptcy and could offer no new openings for urban employment. Mao’s Red Guards had shown their mettle in large-scale fighting and property confiscations and were all too accustomed to beating people, smashing things up, and stealing. Unless they had something to keep them busy, 16 million Red Guards and urban youth were in danger of becoming a destabilizing force in society.
Mao Zedong saw that something needed to be done. “Let educated youth go to the countryside,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “There they can receive further education from the poor and lower-middle peasants.”
Countless families were affected, and many tragedies ensued. Children said good-bye to their tearful parents and left home with a simple bedroll on their backs, heading off for border regions and rural villages. Transplanted into China’s poorest areas, they began a life of deprivation, of sad partings and all too short reunions. Of the high school graduates in our town who “went up to the mountains and down to the villages,” some were sent to Heilongjiang, a thousand miles away, and others were relocated to hinterland areas in their home province. These former Red Guards were now pessimistic and despondent about their future prospects. Every time they came home on a few days’ furlough, they waxed nostalgic about their networking during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and loved to regale us with vivid accounts of their adventures. But somehow it was their reports of what happened at the train stations that I remember best.
As they networked, Red Guards crammed into all the trains running on Chinese tracks. Some managed to stretch out underneath the seats, and some squeezed themselves onto the luggage racks overhead, but most had to settle for standing hour after hour as their train wended its way slowly from one stop to the next. The toilets were even more congested than they would be on my train out of Beijing twenty years later, so it was utterly impossible to use the facilities. As soon as the train pulled into a station, the Red Guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube; boys would boldly unbuckle their belts and urinate and defecate right there on the platform, while girls would huddle in circles, taking turns to squat down and do their business within this human shield, hidden from the prying gaze of boys with wicked notions. Then the Red Guards, boys and girls alike, would squeeze back into the carriages and the train would pull away, leaving the platform dotted with foul-smelling piles and puddles.
My classmate’s older brother was for a time the symbol of revolution in my eyes, because he loved to tell stories about his experiences as a Red Guard traveling the country. Later, however, after a bamboo flute appeared in his hand, he no longer talked about his splendid adventures and instead became silent and subdued. Each time he returned from the countryside, he arrived wearing mud-stained old sneakers, carrying an old canvas duffel bag in his right hand and the flute in his left. It would be much the same picture when he headed back a few days later, except that by then his mother would have washed his shoes. During his time at home he would sit by the window playing his flute—fitful, fragmentary snatches of revolutionary anthems that, as performed by him, lost their impassioned energy and took on a decadent lassitude. Sometimes he would simply sit at the window, a blank look on his face, and if we went up and said hello, he made no effort to acknowledge us.
Once so communicative, he had become a different person, taciturn and glum. Perhaps his flute had replaced speech, giving expression to the complex of emotions that he could never put into words. During those two years, any time I heard the trill of a bamboo flute as I was walking down our lane, I knew that he had come home. The only flute music ever heard in our alley, it served to signal his existence. Now and again he would play the tune of a peddler hawking pear-syrup candy, which would induce us younger kids to come running in his direction, eager for a treat. Seeing our chagrin at having been duped, he would chortle with amusement, then revert to his customary silence.
This erstwhile totem of revolution died during my final year in primary school. He had come back home again and this time stayed for a couple of weeks, refusing to return to the countryside. As I passed his house I would often hear his father cursing him as a slacker and a good-for-nothing. In a feeble voice he would dispute this, saying he simply felt so exhausted he just didn’t have the energy to work in the fields. “You’re as lazy as a little bourgeois!”—his father’s voice went up a notch as he poured scorn on this lame excuse—“Idlers are always complaining they’ve got no energy.”
His mother felt it wouldn’t do to keep on arguing like this, nor was it practical for their son to stay on indefinitely, for it would just lead others to conclude that the problem was ideological. She did everything she could to talk him around, and finally he gave in. On the day of his departure she slipped a couple of hard-boiled eggs in his jacket pocket—they were luxury items in those days. I glimpsed him as he left. By then he was as thin as a rake and his complexion had a yellowish tinge. He shuffled off with his head bowed, the flute in his left hand, that battered old duffel bag in his right, his old sneakers on his feet. He was sobbing and kept rubbing his eyes with his left sleeve.
That was the last time I saw him on his own two feet. A few days later, out in the fields, he collapsed on the ground and ended up being carried into the county hospital on a door panel. The doctors diagnosed his condition as late-stage hepatitis and rushed him off to Shanghai, but he died in the ambulance on the way there. According to my father, when they examined him in the hospital, they found that his liver had shrunk to a minuscule size and was as hard as a stone. With his passing, the flute that had graced my childhood forever fell silent.
What is revolution? The answers I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.
Two scenes linger before my eyes, one that sums up for me the beauty of the human character and another that epitomizes its ugliness.
The first of those images is that of a classmate’s father. He became a target of attack when I was in first grade; being just a low-level official in the Communist Party apparatus did not protect him from being labeled a capitalist-roader. I liked him because he recognized me as his son’s classmate and always smiled at me in the street—the only grown-up to do so, so far as I can remember. After he became a target, I never saw that heartwarming smile again, and if we ran into each other, he would quickly look away. During his months on the blacklist he must have been subjected to all kinds of mistreatment; every time I saw him, his face was battered and bruised. My classmate, once a cheerful, carefree boy, now had terror in his eyes, and during recess he would stand by himself in a corner as the rest of us played. One morning he arrived at school crying and sobbing, and as he stood waiting for the bell to ring, his whole body shook and he buried his face in his hands. His father, we soon learned, had drowned himself in a well. The culmination of many weeks of suffering, his suicide was surely not an impetuous act on his part, but he had taken great care to conceal his intentions from his loved ones. Torn between staying and leaving, in the end he elected death; in the early hours of the morning he rose silently, bade a soundless farewell to his sleeping wife and son, then opened the door and took that leap into another world. I had seen him in the street just a few hours before. Blood was trickling down his forehead, and he was walking with a limp. In the failing light of that late afternoon, his right hand rested on his son’s scrawny shoulders, and as he talked to the boy, he wore a smile of seeming nonchalance. Many years later, as I wrote Brothers at my home in Beijing, I was always haunted by that spectacle of a father walking with his son on the last evening of his life. It was out of that indelible image, perhaps, that Song Fanping emerged to live and die in the pages of my book.‡
The ugliness I observed in second grade. As we children ran around during recess, our teachers would stand in the playground in clusters of two or three, exchanging a few words while they kept a watchful eye on us. A couple of the second-grade women teachers would regularly stand next to each other and chatter away jovially. Often I would hear them cackling over some amusing story and I would throw them an envious glance, for it seemed to me they had a special rapport, like sisters who share all their inner thoughts. One morning, however, I arrived at school early, before anybody else had arrived in the playground. I went into the classroom to find one of the teachers already at her desk, correcting homework. Looking up, she beckoned me conspiratorially and told me with unmistakable excitement and relish that her colleague was the daughter of a landlord—something the school had just learned, after sending someone to her hometown to conduct inquiries—and now she was in custody and facing investigation. When I realized how this teacher was savoring the other’s downfall, I was struck with horror, for all along I had been so sure they were best friends. Later I would always shudder when I saw teachers in the playground engaged in seemingly intimate conversation. Even the gruesome street battles didn’t frighten me as much as that false veneer of camaraderie.
What was revolution? In my early years I had a living example before me, in the shape of my brother. Hua Xu was born, it seemed, for revolutionary agitation; “To rebel is justified” could have been his blood type. When still in second grade, he performed a revolutionary feat that shocked the whole school. His grade teacher had criticized him, in harsh language that he found offensive, for disrupting class. He rose to his feet, picked up his chair, and carried it to the side of the rostrum where the teacher was standing. As she watched in bewilderment, he jumped up on the chair and from this commanding height smashed his fist into the side of her head, just above her ear. Though just nine years old, he managed to deliver a knockout punch; the next thing the teacher knew, she was lying in a hospital bed.
Once he entered middle school, Hua Xu’s revolutionary nature found even richer soil to till. The testimony of his language-and-literature teacher left a deep impression on me: when pushed beyond her limits, she took the step of visiting us at home and delivering to my parents a long list of grievances, interspersed with bouts of tears. To catalog all her charges took her quite some time, and one particular episode she recounted has always stayed in my mind.
During class one day that winter, Hua Xu had taken off his sneakers and laid them on the windowsill to dry out in the sun. His nylon socks gave off a rank stench, all the more intrusive because he sat in the front row and put his feet on the top of his desk. As the teacher introduced the lesson, she had altogether too close an encounter with the stink emanating from my brother’s direction. She told him to put his shoes on. No, he couldn’t do that, he said; his footwear required a further period of exposure to the sun. So saying, he wiggled his toes ostentatiously, the better to distribute his foot odor. Goaded beyond endurance, the teacher stormed over, picked up the shoes, and chucked them out the window. But Hua Xu knew how to counter that: he jumped onto his desk, and from there onto the rostrum, where he grabbed the teacher’s notes, then ran over to the window and tossed them out, too. Amid the cheers of his classmates he then jumped out the window and climbed back in again, sneakers in hand. Returning his shoes to their preferred location, he plopped himself down in his chair and put his feet back on his desk. Finally, like a conductor leading an orchestra, he waved his hands in the air to direct his classmates’ applause and watched in triumph as the teacher shuffled dejectedly out of the classroom. She could not bring herself to hop out and back in the window as my brother had done, so was forced to make a long detour around the building to retrieve her notes. As she bent down to pick them up off the ground, she noticed her pupils’ faces glued to the windows and heard a gloating chorus of mockery.
My father was incensed. No sooner did he see the teacher out the door than he sprang into action, grabbing a stool by its leg and hurling it at Hua Xu, who dodged to one side and deflected the blow. My mother tried desperately to put herself between them. “I can’t believe these outrageous things you’ve done!” my father cried.
Hua Xu was unabashed. “Revolution—that’s what I’ve done.”
At last my father managed to shove my mother aside. He charged, fists raised. Hua Xu turned tail and fled, but once he had reached a place of relative safety, he called back defiantly: “Revolution—that’s what I’ve done!”
It made me hanker for revolution. Cultural Revolution or not, we primary school pupils were afraid of our teachers. If we talked or distracted others in class or if we got into a fight, they would often force us to write self-criticisms. I must have written more self-criticisms in primary school than I did compositions. And our teachers would then paste them up on the classroom walls, making us lose a lot of face. The exploits of Hua Xu and the other older boys gave us a sense that we wouldn’t have to write any more self-criticisms once we got into middle school, for there it was not the pupils who were afraid of the teachers but the other way around. Once we got into middle school, we thought, misbehavior had a chance of gaining legitimacy as revolutionary action.
So it was that in the early summer of 1972 we crossed the new concrete bridge and entered the grounds of Haiyan Secondary School. Some students were playing basketball, and others lay sprawled on the grass, chatting away. As we passed the classroom buildings, we saw students sitting on almost all the windowsills. One of them beckoned us—a boy from our alley who was a year older than us. “Just got out of class, did you?” we asked.
He shook his head. “No, we’re in the middle of class.” He leaned out, pulled each of us up through the window, and introduced us to his neighbors.
We’d never seen anything like this. The classroom was buzzing with noise, with some pupils sitting on desks, others walking back and forth, and a couple locked in a furious argument, seemingly about to come to blows. A teacher stood on the rostrum, writing some physics problems on the blackboard. As he wrote, he explained some point or other, but not one of his pupils seemed to be listening.
This scene left us dumbfounded. We had to be missing something. We pointed at the teacher. “Who’s he talking to?” we asked our friend.
