Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (7 page)

I imagined that Papa looked out the window one evening and saw someone in the street outside. Whoever it was looked up and saw him before he stepped away from the window. Now this person knew where we lived. Now maybe he was crouching at the bottom of the stairs. Waiting.

I wanted to scream and run away. I had no idea what to do. Even worse, I concluded, neither did Papa.

I told Xiaolan what Papa said. I asked what she thought it meant. She said she’d never heard her parents use the phrase but she didn’t think it was about anything bad.

Papa didn’t know that during those nights he had a secret sharer listening to his stories, his memories, his sorrows, his songs and his sobs. He never knew that his daughter lay beneath his son’s crib, like a trapped angel or a cornered god, unable to do anything but listen and wonder.

On the night of January 20, 1966, Papa toasted the arrival of the Year of the Horse. He raised his cup of wine and proclaimed, “To a year of changes. Everything is going to get better.” The rest of us at the table responded by raising our teacups and chorusing agreement.

“The Year of the Horse—that means … happy times,” Mama added.

We took turns describing the changes we wished for. But Grandmother cautioned, “The Year of the Horse also bring chaos and turbulence. We must not forget that.” Her words cast a momentary pall over our celebration. But Papa responded, “This may be true, Mother. But we will hope for the best.”

Yiding jumped to his feet, poked me in the ribs and shouted, “Happy times! Happy times!” and ran away. I leaped from my stool and chased him down the corridor while Yicun, laughing loudly, followed close on my heels. We ran in and out of the bedroom and chased one another in a circle until we fell in a heap on the floor, tickling one another and laughing uncontrollably.

At midnight we went outside and ignited a string of firecrackers. We giggled and screamed and covered our ears as red and yellow flashes
punctured the darkness and explosions echoed off nearby buildings. Our neighbors were also outside celebrating. I saw Xiaolan and her parents huddled together nearby, lighting firecrackers. I waved and shouted “Happy New Year” during a lapse in the noise. She heard me and did a playful little dance and waved back.

————

In mid-May the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a call for a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao denounced Party officials who were “following the capitalist road” and cautioned against “counterrevolutionary revisionists” within the Party. The moment had come for purging the Party, he said, for eliminating enemies of the state and their ideas.

A huge poster was put up on a wall on the campus of Beijing University, calling on all students to “resolutely, thoroughly, cleanly and completely eliminate all demons and monsters, and counterrevolutionary revisionists.” The
People’s Daily
, official organ of the Communist Party, printed the text of the poster and called on true revolutionaries to embrace the leadership of Chairman Mao. Those who opposed him, the paper declared, must be struck down.

Students in other universities and high schools rallied in support. They accused teachers and administrators and local government officials of opposition to Chairman Mao. Revolutionary committees were organized to coordinate and carry out a new revolution.

Our hopes for better times faded as quickly as the pop of firecrackers on New Year’s Eve.

————

On the morning of June 1, following the radio broadcast describing the excitement in Beijing, students at Anhui University suspended classes, formed revolutionary committees and seized control of the campus.

Papa walked to his literature seminar early that morning to find an
empty classroom. He went upstairs searching for his students. He found them packed into a room heatedly debating “revolution” and composing posters.

He reported the situation to the chairman of his department. The chairman advised, “The only thing to do is to wait in your classroom for the students to return. If they don’t return today, they will tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then next week. Be patient. This whole thing will blow over in a short time.”

Papa returned to his classroom and sat at a desk. Overhead he heard the thunder of footsteps rushing back and forth and excited outbursts of singing and strident chanting. He gazed out the window and listened and worried. He paged through his lecture notes and replaced them in a folder. At the end of the hour he came home.

The next morning he proceeded to his classroom, and his students did not appear. He came home before the full hour passed.

On Friday he did not go to his class.

Classes were suspended for the next several years at Anhui University. The only times Papa faced his students after June 1 were when they dragged him from our apartment to beat him and denounce him or cage him up with other faculty members in dormitory rooms from which they extracted him periodically for further abuse.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had come to Hefei.

On the morning of June 4—a Saturday and the day after my eighth birthday—I arose early and went to a nearby market to do the family grocery shopping. Despite the early hour, scores of students scurried about, huddled in small groups and conferring excitedly. Several large posters had been affixed to the walls of campus buildings and students gathered in front of them.

When I returned home, several thousand students and outsiders crowded the campus sidewalks and lawns, shouting, singing and reading aloud. The disturbances that began on Wednesday had become a mania. A typhoon of noise and activity swirled around me. Students rushed by, their eyes fixed on the walls where posters had just been displayed or where people were congregating. I recognized some of Papa’s students.

Posters were pasted on every building, tree and utility pole on campus. The wall around the campus had been transformed into an unbroken palisade of posters. Wire and rope had been strung between trees, poles and buildings. Reed mats were tied to them and posters affixed to the mats. Most posters were the size of two or three newspaper pages. But some were as big as bedsheets, constructed from a dozen newspaper
pages. Each was filled from top to bottom with bold red-and-black slogans, discourses, accusations, revelations, caricatures and cartoons.

I navigated my way through the turbulent sea of enthusiasts and carried the groceries to our apartment. After I’d put away the food I returned to campus and wandered through the crowd looking, reading and listening.

I was jostled by students eager to get closer to some poster or to move on to another. Students gushed in a steady stream from buildings where they constructed and composed posters, the ink dripping from the trailing paper and sprinkling the sidewalks, grass and bystanders. My bare feet were soon speckled with red and black. The shirts and trousers of students were doused in ink, and their forearms and hands were stained. A group wedged its way through the mass, crying frantically, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” They held a freshly composed poster high above their heads. Once they found an open slot, they hurriedly put up their composition and began reading it to the crowd.

At first I thought everyone participating in this activity must be having fun. It looked and sounded like a gigantic playground for adults. But soon I was struck by the fact that none of the participants was smiling or laughing. When students at my school made posters, it was fun.

Many posters proclaimed devotion to Chairman Mao and demanded implementation of the new Party policy of eradicating the Four Olds—old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits. Others, more strident, demanded that the people “sweep away all cow demons and snake spirits”—a phrase resurrected from Chinese myth to describe enemies of the people. The new demons and spirits were landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and the running dogs who supported them. Prominent among running dogs were academics, who, it was revealed, used classrooms and the press to undermine the revolution in order to restore the rule of the Nationalists and capitalist exploiters. “The intelligentsia fancy themselves the nation’s brain,” one poster proclaimed. “In fact, they are not the brain but the shit.”

After an hour of watching students tear down old posters and put up new ones, I found myself standing before a poster that struck me with dread. My heart began beating so hard I feared those standing around me might hear it. The poster showed a large crouching tiger with a man’s face and long fangs. Blood dripped from the open mouth. The caption proclaimed,
WU NINGKUN, THE PAPER TIGER ISN’T DEAD
.

The drawing exaggerated Papa’s black-rimmed spectacles and the mane of hair combed straight across his forehead. An American flag was painted on his cheek. I quickly stepped to the next poster only to find yet another ugly caricature of Papa. One accused him of undermining the socialist spirit of his students by assigning bourgeois texts. Yet another condemned his use of
Gulliver’s Travels
and
The Great Gatsby
.

An entire series of posters alleged that Papa used radio broadcasts to undermine student faith in the Communist Party. He had indeed been given clearance to use excerpts of broadcasts from the BBC and VOA in addition to Radio Beijing for listening comprehension courses. Because it was a crime to listen to “enemy broadcasts,” the local Bureau of Public Security had to extend special permission for Papa to make recordings from the broadcasts. He was the only former “enemy of the people” in Hefei granted such permission. Yet now he was under suspicion for making the recordings, and the administrators who had helped him gain access were also in trouble.

Beneath the smiling tiger caricature was an explanation of why Papa, despite his decapping, remained an enemy of the people. “Wu Ningkun,” it read, “has a criminal past. As early as 1943 he worked as an interpreter for the Imperial American Flying Tigers and the Nationalist Air Force. During his eight-year stay in the United States he was secretly trained as a spy. Under the disguise of a professor of English, he came back to teach at Yenching University in 1951. His crime was exposed when he was denounced as an ultra-rightist and sent to prison on April 17, 1958.”

I had known only that Papa was away when I was small and that he had spent three years in concentration camps in northeast China. I was not even sure what a concentration camp was.

I glanced around as I read, fearing that someone might recognize me and point me out as the daughter of the man on the poster, raise an accusatory finger and detain me. I wanted a gust of wind to blow away these posters. I wanted a rainstorm to wash out the hateful words and pictures. I wanted everyone around me to stop reading and go home and forget what they’d seen. As I slipped toward the rear of the crowd, I could not hold back my tears. I shielded my eyes with my open hand. Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone grasped my shoulder. I looked up to see one of Papa’s students, a young man who had visited our apartment. Half a dozen others stood with him in a semicircle, watching me. They were all smiling.

“You can read this, can’t you?” asked the student holding me. He pointed to the nearest poster.

“No,” I responded timidly.

He pointed to the characters near the bottom of the poster and read them aloud:
OUR GREAT LEADER CHAIRMAN MAO SAID THE U.S. IMPERIALISTS AND REACTIONARIES ARE PAPER TIGERS
.

I stared at the poster and said nothing.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, and the others chimed in. “We are your friends. Wu Ningkun is your enemy.”

The lead student spoke solicitously. “You love Chairman Mao. We love Chairman Mao. We are comrades. All of us.”

Another whispered into his ear, and he beamed and said, “Come with us. We’ll help you make a poster like this. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

I was too frightened to say no.

A student took my hand firmly in hers and led me through the crowd. Those escorting me chattered enthusiastically about the poster they planned to construct. One of them asked, “Are you a revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary?”

I knew the only correct answer to that question and responded meekly, “A revolutionary.”

Everyone laughed.

On the second floor of their dormitory stood a tall stack of old newspapers. Someone had lined up several large pots of black and red ink. The student leader said, “Yimao, little revolutionary, you are going to make a poster denouncing your father.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” I said, my voice quivering.

“We’ll show you,” he said.

The students unfolded newspaper pages and pasted them together into a single large sheet. One student dipped a brush in the black ink and handed it to me. “I’ll help you,” he said and grasped my wrist and guided the movement of my hand to make the large characters. As our locked hands made each stroke of a character, he pronounced it. Together we wrote,
DOWN WITH THE COW DEMON
,
SNAKE SPIRIT
,
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY
,
SMILING PAPER TIGER
,
ULTRA
-
RIGHTIST
,
U
.
S
.
SPY
,
WU NINGKUN
!
LONG LIVE THE GREAT LEADER CHAIRMAN MAO
!

At the bottom of the poster we signed my name, Wu Yimao.

The other students read it aloud approvingly.

Two students carefully picked up the poster, and we proceeded out onto campus. They put up my poster. A crowd quickly gathered to read it.

The students lost interest in me, and I pushed my way through the crowd and returned home, troubled by what had happened. I prayed that Papa and Mama would not see my poster and that no one would tell them about it. I hoped someone would soon paste another over it.

At dinner Yiding said he had seen the posters on campus, and he asked Papa what snake spirits and cow demons were. Papa explained, “They’re nothing. You shouldn’t worry about them.”

I sensed at that moment that my father had seen my poster. I wanted to confess everything, to tell him all I’d done and that I was sorry, and that they had made me do it. But I did not have the courage. I stared at the table and clenched my teeth.