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“Ah, you have mountains here! Imagine how many fields you could create!” as if the fertile hills covered in orchards were like the barren mountains of his native village. But his remarks had the force of law. The crowds of university students dynamited the orchards that had provided Chengdu with apples, plums, peaches, and flowers.
We transported stones from afar with pull carts and shoulder poles, for the construction of terraced rice paddies.
a piece of theater—a pointless means to a pointless end.
“white and expert.”
For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of “class hatred,” respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence….
was struck less by the West’s technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible
amount of liberty.
This was at a time when in Sichuan, “Heaven’s Granary,” our meat ration was half a pound per month,
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the first novel I read in English.
discipline and civic morality.
One nurse told me that earlier in the Cultural Revolution the room had been used for the inmates to study Chairman Mao’s works because his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had “discovered” that Mao’s Little Red Book, rather
senescent,
After my father’s death she had had a collapse, but she battled with undiminished determination from her sickbed.
Now, thanks to a regulation which said that when a state employee died one of their offspring could take their place, my sister was given a post in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine.
Acts of protest broke out all over China, and reached their peak during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in spring 1976, when the Chinese traditionally pay their respects to the dead.
and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other.
The idea that a university education should make a difference to one’s job had been condemned by Mao as “training spiritual aristocrats.”
In July 1977 Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated again and made deputy to Hua Guofeng. Every speech by Deng was a blast of fresh air. Political campaigns were to end. Political “studies” were “exorbitant taxes and levies” and must be stopped. Party policies must be based on reality, not dogma.
I contemplated my twenty-six years. I had experienced privilege as well as denunciation, courage as well as fear, seen kindness and loyalty as well as the depths of human ugliness. Amid suffering, ruin, and death, I had above all known love and the indestructible human capacity to survive and to pursue happiness.
