I found my fourth brother, Cunsang, as soon as we’d finished. “How is it going?” he asked.
“It’s boring! I hate it!” I replied.
“Join the tribe. Why did you think I wanted you to make chaos when my teacher came to our house that time?” He was reminding me of the time we received the broomstick beating from our dia.
“How can you understand the writing? It all looks like grass to me,” I said.
He burst into laughter. “That’s what I thought the first few weeks. It will get better, I promise.”
I didn’t believe him. “What’s the use of learning words anyway?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly.
I followed him to my fifth brother’s classroom on the opposite side of the school ground and found Cunfar in the middle of a pile of bodies, wrestling each other onto the ground.
“How was your first lesson, scholar?” he teased breathlessly, as he dusted off the dirt.
“All agony, no fun,” I replied.
“The math is even more fun!” Cunsang gave a wicked smile.
“Can’t be worse than Chinese,” I said.
“Just wait!” he replied, as the bell rang for the next class.
I had prepared myself for the worst in our math class, but to my surprise the numbers were more bearable than the grasslike Chinese writing. But even so, numbers represented nothing to me, and I still preferred to dream of running wild outside and playing games with my friends.
The journey to and from school was much more interesting than the study itself. Besides stopping at the sandy bank to wrestle and play horse fights, we occasionally detoured to a local butcher shop that only killed pigs. The heart-piercing screams of the pigs were horrible. We would watch as our own pigs, with their legs tied, were carried away to be killed for meat. The pigs always seemed to know what was about to happen to them: they would refuse to eat, even if given better food. I would hear their desperate screams and would press my hands hard against my ears and run away to hide rather than witness this unbearable scene. The thought of our own happy pigs being sliced up by the butcher always made my stomach churn.
I wasn’t the best student in my year, but I did earn enough votes among my classmates to become one of the first Little Red Scarf Guards in our class. We wore a triangular red scarf around our necks, and for this honor we had to qualify in Mao’s “Three Goods”: good study, good work and good health.
I didn’t learn much academic stuff at all during my time at school, except the many propaganda phrases and songs, and many of those I didn’t even understand. I learned how to write simplified versions of the Chinese characters and some basic math equations, but I really only lived for the two weekly sports classes. I was good at the sporting stuff. We had rope hopping, and track-and-field which was mainly running, and by the second half of our second year Teacher Song had selected Yang Ping as the captain of our class and me as the vice captain.
By this time I was ten years old and the campaign to “Learn Lei Feng” had started in all the local schools. Our textbooks were full of Lei Feng’s inspiring stories. He was a humble soldier who did many kind deeds. He helped the disadvantaged and especially the elderly, not for personal glory but because he wanted to be a faithful and humble soldier of Mao’s. Lei Feng’s diary showed how devoted he was to Mao’s ideals. Extracts from his diary were published and included in our textbooks. Everyone of all ages in China was encouraged to learn from him. Everyone wanted to be a “Living Lei Feng.” We learned a song that encouraged us to “pick up the screw by the roadside and give it to the police,” to contribute to our great country in any way, from the smallest contribution, such as the little screw, to the great sacrifices of one’s life, like Lei Feng himself.
One day a student from our school found a coin on the road and gave it to his teacher. He was instantly praised by the headmaster as a model student. His action was what Lei Feng would have done. From then on, much money was found by students by the roadside and the headmaster’s money jar quickly filled up, until one day a parent complained that his child had taken all their savings and given them to her teacher.
For a brief period some students stopped attending school or were late for classes because they said they were helping the elderly and the needy just like Lei Feng. But they were just being lazy, and the teachers soon found out. A moral, a “tonic story,” for these students was told in our classes:One day, Lei Feng was late for his military activity because he was carrying home an elderly lady with bound feet. The head of his army unit criticized him without knowing the real reason behind his tardiness. Lei Feng apologized and wrote in his diary that he should be able to do kind things for the needy as well as carrying out the normal required activities.
After this, the school demanded that all kind deeds should be conducted outside school hours.
I, like many of my classmates, wanted to be a hero like Lei Feng. The things he did deeply moved me. His spirit of “forgetting himself to help others” was my living motto. Some classmates and I often went to veterans’ homes to help them sweep their yards or carry water from the wells. We even picked up horse droppings from the street and took them to the fields as fertilizer. We needed to do at least one kind deed each day and write it down in our diaries. I thought maybe someone would read my diary after I’d died and realize I’d done even more kind things than Lei Feng. Then I would be a hero too! But I was only ten years old. I didn’t think of it as another propaganda campaign to secure our loyalty to Mao and his communist state.
During those school years of mine, the central government released Mao’s newest propaganda campaigns one after another. Our regular classes were constantly disrupted and we were ordered to study Mao’s latest magical words by heart. Often our school organized rallies when we would march around the villages playing drums, cymbals and other instruments, carrying gigantic pictures of Chairman Mao and waving red flags. Everyone carried Mao’s Red Book, and we marched with pride and honor. I felt so happy to be one of Mao’s Little Red Scarf Guards. Once I was chosen to lead the shouting of the political slogans. When we passed our village, I glanced around and saw my niang and my fourth aunt standing in the middle of the crowd. I shouted at the top of my voice then. “Long, long live Chairman Mao!” Other leaders shouted at the same time. Different sections of our class followed different leaders. It was completely chaotic, but we all wanted our mothers to see and hear us.
“Niang, did you hear me?!” I asked her when I came home that day.
“How could I hear you? It was like a zoo out there!” she replied.
One day at school, during lunchtime, some shocking news about Mao’s chosen successor came through our village’s loudspeakers. Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s plane had been shot down over Mongolia. It was October 1971. Lin Biao had been trying to flee to the Soviet Union when his evil motives were discovered. There was speculation that the plane he was on contained many top-secret documents. The most nerve-racking speculation was that there were factions of the military loyal to Lin Biao who could be attempting a coup to topple Mao’s government.
As young boys we were told how close Lin Biao was to Chairman Mao, how devoted and trustworthy he was to Mao’s political cause. After all, he had written the foreword in Mao’s Red Book. Lin Biao was said to have always had the Red Book in his hand.
When we returned to our school that afternoon, all scheduled classes were suspended. We were summoned to the school ground. Two speakers were set up by the headmaster’s office. With microphone in hand, the headmaster read out a document from the central government. Lin Biao had been planning a major coup for a number of years, and Chairman Mao had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts. How fortunate it was that our great leader was safe and that we would still be able to enjoy our sun, our rain and our daily oxygen! We must study harder to strengthen our resolve so we, the next generation of communist young guards, could carry the communist red flag forward.
After th
is speech, he ordered us back to our classes to study Mao’s Red Book for the rest of the afternoon. I, like all my classmates, was truly scared that if Lin Biao had succeeded, we would all live in the dark ages once more. This only made me more determined to be a good young guard of Chairman Mao’s. At dinner that night, all of my brothers talked excitedly about Lin Biao’s demise. But our parents’ reactions were different.
“Who cares about Lin Biao!” our niang said. “All I’m concerned about is food on the table.”
“Your niang is right,” our dia chipped in. “Who has time to worry about the government? What we need is enough food so we can survive.”
Our parents were not alone in taking little notice of Lin Biao’s fate. But at school in the following days we had many discussion sessions about the Lin Biao incident. When there was no more information from the central government, the school eventually resumed its normal schedule.
During my second year at school, we learned how to write “We love Chairman Mao” and “Kill, crush Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the class enemies.” I still wondered how useful all this talk about Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese president, and his right-hand man, Deng Xiaoping, was meant to be. Sometimes we’d write these things in chalk on the walls of people’s houses. Over time, with people scribbling over each other’s writing, all the words became muddled. Some of the older boys often wrote rude remarks about people they didn’t like, and common family names such as Zhang, Li, Wang and Zhou often got mixed up in the scribble.
One day, an education official from the Qingdao government passed through our village and noticed some of the writing: “Kill, crush, Mao, Zhou and Lai,” it read. The official charged into the village office and demanded a thorough investigation. Many people were questioned by the police. And for the first time I could remember, mass hysteria began in our commune.
The next day, in the middle of our math class, our headmaster and two policemen came in and asked all the students who lived in the New Village to stand up. We didn’t know what was happening. The headmaster told us to follow him to his office. The door was shut behind us and we were divided into two groups. The police questioned us, one by one, for a whole morning. To my great surprise, the topic was about the writing on our village wall. I thought it was going to be about something much more important! Did you write on the wall? What did you write? Did you see anyone else write on that wall? Have you seen any strangers in your village lately? Do you know anyone who may dislike Chairman Mao or Premier Zhou? I was so puzzled. I couldn’t imagine anyone not loving our great leaders, and anyway, anyone who was a counterrevolutionary would surely have been shot already.
Without any success, the officials eventually let the matter go. But the police appeared in our village quite frequently after that, and none of the children ever dared write anything on the walls again.
It wasn’t long after this, on the way home from school, that I found something that was to become my secret treasure. It was a book. Only about forty pages, lying on the street near the garbage dump. I picked it up with the intention of taking it home so our family could use it as toilet paper, but somehow I started to read the first page and couldn’t stop. It was a foreign story translated into Chinese. I couldn’t understand all the words but I could make out that the story was about a rich steel baron, in some place called Chicago, who fell in love with a young girl. I’d just got to the bit where he used his money to build a new theater when the pages ran out. How I wished I’d had the rest of the book! It was such delicious reading! Love stories were hard to find. I would have given anything to read the whole thing. But the Red Guards destroyed any books that contained even a hint of romance or Western flavor. You would be jailed if such books were found in your house.
I kept those forty pages for a long time, locking them like a treasure in my personal drawer, never realizing the danger I’d put my family in. I read it many times. I pored over the words. I wondered how the people in the story could have such freedom. It sounded too good to be true. But even after hearing years of fearful propaganda about America and the West, the book was enough to plant a seed of curiosity in my heart. I asked some of my brothers if any of them had read such a book and hoped that one of them could tell me the rest of the story. But none of them did. My fifth brother even accused me of making it all up, but still I was not going to divulge my sacred find.
To satisfy our need for stories, some friends and I turned to the opera and ballet storybooks which our older siblings were given at school. We would act out different characters, and especially loved the scenes with guns, swords or fighting. Acting out the dying scene was always a delight! Everyone wanted the hero’s role but we had to share that over different days. We play-acted like this even before we started school in the mornings. We couldn’t read many of the words in the books, so we based the plot on fables we’d been told or we made up stories and dialogue as we went along.
More stimulus for our hungry imaginations came from the touring movies. Once or, if we were lucky, twice a year, a small group of people from the Qingdao Propaganda Bureau would come to our village to entertain us with a movie about things like Mao’s Red Army triumphing against the Japanese army, or Chiang Kaishek’s Guomindang regime, or the struggle against the class enemies, or touching stories about Mao’s revolutionary heroes. There were also popular opera and ballet movies such as The Red Lantern and a ballet called The Red Detachment of Women, but the first half hour of every showing always screened documentaries about Mao’s faithful followers—unbelievable but inspiring stories for us youngsters to absorb.
The day before the movie was to be shown, our village had to put up a temporary wooden frame to hang the movie screen from. We set our little stools or bamboo mats in front of it as soon as the frame was up, to secure our places and, to prevent anyone from stealing our belongings, at least two of my older brothers would sleep there overnight. Arguments often flared up about whose place was whose, but as soon as a date was set and the names of the movies were known, we would discuss nothing but the coming event. I could hardly contain my excitement! I was such an emotional mess at the movies. Everything would make me sob. My emotions would linger for many days afterwards as I went endlessly over the details of each movie in my mind. My devotion to Mao and his ideology was greatly intensified. I wanted to be a revolutionary hero! Another child of Mao! But I loved the Beijing Opera singers as well, their singing, dancing, fighting and acrobatic skills. They were as close to a Kung Fu movie as we would ever get. The Kung Fu masters were the heroes of my imagination, but the Kung Fu books and movies were banned in China then. We had only the folktales told by some of the elderly people in our village to keep that passion alive.
I liked the stories and the fighting in the Chinese ballet movies too, but I really thought the people looked funny standing on their toes, and they didn’t speak any words, so opera always won over ballet when it came to choosing a play for us to act out. Secretly I held a dream—one day I would be able to sing and do the Kung Fu steps that the opera singers did. But I knew deep in my heart that this dream would never come true. It was the commune fields for me.
7
LEAVING HOME
I was nearly eleven years old when, one day at school, while we were busy as usual memorizing some of Chairman Mao’s sayings, the headmaster came into our freezing classroom with four dignified-looking people, all wearing Mao’s jackets and coats with synthetic fur collars.
I immediately thought of the incident about the writing on the wall. Not again. What’s wrong this time? But to my surprise, the headmaster introduced them as Madame Mao’s representatives from Beijing. They were here to select talented students to study ballet and to serve in Chairman Mao’s revolution. He asked us all to stand up and sing “We Love Chairman Mao”:The east is red, the sun is rising.
China’s Mao Zedong is born.
Here to give us happiness.
Hu lu hai ya.
Our lucky star who saved us all.
&
nbsp; As we sang, the four representatives came down the aisles and selected a girl with big eyes, straight teeth and a pretty face. They passed me without taking any notice, but just as they were walking out of our classroom, Teacher Song hesitated. She tapped the last gentleman from Beijing on the shoulder and pointed at me. “What about that one?” she said.
The gentleman from Beijing glanced in my direction. “Okay, he can come too,” he said in an off-hand manner, in perfect Mandarin dialect.
The girl with the big eyes and I followed Madame Mao’s people into the headmaster’s office. It was the only room with a coal-burning heater, a handmade contraption cobbled together from a bucket, with pipes attached in all directions like spider legs. Despite this luxury, though, the room was still extremely cold.
There were other children already in the room when we arrived—ten children had been chosen altogether, and we all wore our thick-quilted homemade coats and pants and looked like little round snowballs as we stood together in the freezing room.
“Take all your clothes off except your underwear! Step forward one by one! We are going to measure your body and test your flexibility,” a man with glasses ordered.
Everyone stood there nervously. Nobody moved.
“What’s your problem? Didn’t you hear? Take your clothes off!” our headmaster barked.
“I’m sorry,” one of the boys answered timidly, “but I don’t have any underwear.”
To my surprise, I was the only child who had underwear, hand-me-downs from several older brothers, multi-layered and patchworked with mending by my niang. All ten of us during that audition had to share my one set of underwear.