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Just before I left Peking, a letter came from my mother.
So when Mao launched his call to “seize power,” he found a huge constituency of people who wanted to take revenge on somebody. Although power was dangerous, it was more desirable than powerlessness, particularly to people who had never had it. Now it looked to the general public as if Mao was saying that power was up for grabs.
One major target of the Rebels was the professional elite in every unit, not only prominent doctors, artists, writers, and scientists, but also engineers and graded workers, even model night-soil collectors (people who collect human waste, which
Rival factions competed to outdo each other in brutality. Much of the population colluded, driven by intimidation, conformism, devotion to Mao, desire to settle personal scores, or just the releasing of frustration.
He told her that he now knew what the Cultural Revolution was really about, and the realization had shattered his whole world. He could see clearly that it had nothing to do with democratization, or with giving ordinary people more say. It was a bloody purge to increase Mao’s personal power.
It was from this time that I developed my way of judging the Chinese by dividing them into two kinds: one humane, and one not. It took an upheaval like the Cultural Revolution to bring out these characteristics in people, whether they were teenage Red Guards, adult Rebels, or capitalist-roaders.
I realized then that when people are happy they become kind.
What had turned people into monsters? What was the reason for all this pointless brutality? It was in this period that my devotion to Mao began
to wane.
Humanitarian considerations had been condemned by Mao as “bourgeois hypocrisy,” and it went without saying that there should be no mercy for “class enemies.”
At the end of the week, he reached his conclusion: schizophrenia. My father was given electric shocks and insulin injections, for which he had to be tied tight onto the bed.
On the one hand, he wanted the factions to unite so that his personal power structure could be established. On the other hand, he seemed incapable of repressing his love of fighting: as bloody wars spread across China he said, “It is not a bad thing to let the young have some practice in using arms—we haven’t had a war for so long.”
But Yan and Yong spoke up for him, as did a few others. “It is rare to see a character like him,” said Yong. “It is not right to punish him. He would not bend even if he were beaten to death. And to torture him is to bring shame on us all. Here is a man of principle!”
Surliness replaced the good service and polite behavior of the pre-Cultural Revolution days. It became extremely common to see people quarreling on the streets—with shop assistants, with bus conductors, with passersby. Another result was that, since no one was looking after birth control, there was a baby boom. The population increased during the Cultural Revolution by two hundred million.
But we said we would stick by him, come what may. My mother said she was pleased and proud of us. Our devotion to our parents was increased by our empathy for their suffering, our admiration for their integrity and courage, and our loathing for their tormentors. We came to feel a new degree of respect, and love, for our parents.
“No other girls dress like you.” But I insisted. I was not trying to make myself look beautiful, just different.
held sacred the traditional Chinese code of loyalty—“giving charcoal in snow.”
They were sneered at by high officials’ children, as well as by their own friends, as “pseuds.”
One of the main ways in which Xiao-hei’s “brothers” occupied their empty days was stealing.
Xiao-hei’s brothers were also obsessed with chasing girls.
The third major occupation of the gangs was fighting,
In those days, beauty was so despised that my family was sent to this lovely house as a punishment. The main room was big and rectangular, with
Writers, scholars, scientists, teachers, doctors, and actors who had become “useless” in Mao’s know-nothing new order were also dispatched there.
“Thought reform through labor” became a handy way of dealing with the surplus Rebels.
The second evening we entered a place called Asbestos County, named after its major product.
accusing them of “using work to suppress revolution”—a
Xichang had a very dry climate, and forest protection rules were not being enforced, nor were the fire services working. As a result, the mountains were burning day after day, only stopping when a gorge blocked the way, or a storm doused the flames.
The Party had been trying to persuade those who had failed exams for high schools and universities to go and “build a splendid new socialist countryside” which would benefit from their education. In their romantic enthusiasm, a number of young people followed the Party’s call.
I think the variant of Nixon’s adviser Charles Colson spelled out the hidden agenda: When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
There was another, more immediate factor in her death: she was denied proper medical care—and could not be looked after, or even seen, by her daughter when she was fatally ill. Because of the Cultural Revolution. How could the revolution be good, I asked myself, when it brought such human destruction, for nothing? Over and over again, I told myself I hated the Cultural Revolution, and I felt even worse because there was nothing I could do.
depended mainly on how many days one worked, rather than how one worked. This was a constant source of resentment among the villagers—in addition to being a massive discouragement to efficiency. Every day, the peasants would screw up their eyes to watch how the others were working in case they themselves were being taken advantage of. No one wanted to work harder than others who earned the same number of work points. Women felt bitter about men who sometimes did the same kind of job as they, but earned two points more. There were constant arguments.
We frequently spent ten hours in the fields doing a job which could have been done in five.
I soon discovered that boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.
They just sat there, and eventually dozed off. I was not sorry to see this form of “education,” designed to stupefy rather than enlighten, gradually wither away.
In the warm evenings, I sat by the fragrant medicinal garden encircled by Chinese trumpet creepers, and thrummed to myself. Once the shop next door closed for the night, I was entirely alone. It was dark except for the gently shining moon and the twinkling of lights from distant cottages. Sometimes fireflies glowed and floated by like torches carried by tiny, invisible flying men. The scents from the garden made me dizzy with pleasure. My music hardly matched the enthusiastic chorus of the thundering frogs and the wistful croon of the crickets. But I found solace in it.
At the beginning of 1971 news filtered through that the Tings had been sacked.
After a long pause, Father said, “If I die like this, don’t believe in the Communist Party anymore.”
Mother did not go back to work, but the most important reason was that my father had not been rehabilitated, unlike most capitalist-roaders.
With Lin gone, Mao had to turn to those purged leaders who still commanded the loyalty of the army, including Deng Xiaoping, who was soon to reemerge. The first concession Mao had to make was to bring back most of the denounced officials.
I got used to the shocks. No one else made a fuss about them, either. One old electrician told me that before 1949, when the factory was privately owned, he had had to use the back of his hand to test the current. It was only under the Communists that the factory was obliged to buy the electricians mains-testers.
We had been scouring country markets for the weird ingredients prescribed for her—tortoiseshell, snake gallbladder, and anteater scales.
I was overjoyed that Nixon had come because his visit helped generate a new climate in which some translations of foreign books were becoming available.
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, with their (to me) up-to-date picture of the outside world. The descriptions of the Kennedy administration in The Best and the Brightest made me marvel at the relaxed atmosphere of the American government, in contrast with my own—so remote, frightening, and secretive.
the restaurant The Whiff of Gunpowder switched back to its old name, The Fragrance of Sweet Wind.
There was to be an entrance exam, Zhou Enlai had decided, although he had to change the term “exam” (kao-shi) to “an investigation into the candidates’ situation of handling some basic knowledge, and their ability to analyze and solve concrete problems,” a criterion based on another Mao quote. Mao did not like exams.
In spring 1973, Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated and appointed vice-premier, the de facto deputy to the ailing Zhou Enlai.
How lucky I was to have my resourceful mother! She went to the wife of the head of the Enrollment Committee, who then spoke to her husband. My mother also went to see the other chiefs, and got them to back me. She emphasized my exam results, which she knew would be the clincher for these former capitalist-roaders. In October 1973, I entered the Foreign Languages Department of Sichuan University in Chengdu to study English.
In October 1973, when I went to Sichuan University, Jin-ming was admitted to the Engineering College of Central China at Wuhan to study casting. He would have preferred to do physics, but he was in seventh heaven anyway.
“We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops.” Acquiring foreign technology became “sniffing after foreigners’ farts and calling them sweet.”
when Zhou was fatally ill with cancer of the gastrointestinal tract.
