The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir (15 page)

Tradition dictated that the ceremony take place before noon (afternoon weddings are for second marriages). The groom showed up in his navy blue suit. He had managed to borrow an old beat-up jeep and a bus, and, based on Mother’s instructions, ostensibly carried four types of gifts for the neighbors to see—two bottles of expensive liquor and two cartons of expensive cigarettes for our family, even though Father did not smoke or drink. He also bought a kilo of beef (taking a daughter away is like taking a piece of flesh from the mother) and a kilo of lotus roots (a play on the Chinese wedding phrase “separated but still connected”). My younger siblings blocked the entranceway and hid my sister’s shoes. The groom had to beg his way through with bribes of money in red envelopes. Inside the house, the groom knelt down in front of Grandma and my parents, thanking them for raising my sister. In return, Mother followed a Xi’an tradition by presenting him with four poached eggs in a bowl. The eggs had been mixed with hot peppers, sugar, vinegar, and bitter herbs, representing all the flavors in life—sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy. The groom cringed but swallowed them down, showing that he was willing to take on all the flavors in life with my sister. Then Mother quietly tucked into my sister’s hand a red envelope containing all the money that was supposedly given to the family by the bridegroom, and asked her to keep it as rainy-day cash.

The groom “snatched” the bride, who was dressed in a red polyester suit, and drove off in the jeep. Friends and relatives were bused to the ceremony, officiated by the Party secretary from my brother-in-law’s company. Bowing to the groom’s parents and company officials, the couple vowed to be a “harmonious revolutionary couple.” His family paid for the wedding banquet that followed.

By the end of the evening, the newlyweds breathed a sigh of relief that it had all gone smoothly, free of complaints from Grandma and Mother. On their beds, they found peanuts and dates to symbolize “giving birth to both boys and girls early.” With the one-child policy, it was really wishful thinking, but my sister didn’t disappoint. Soon after I returned home from the UK, she gave birth to a boy.

Things were changing fast. English was becoming a valuable skill in the new era, not least of all in Xi’an, which began opening to foreign tourists in the late 1970s. Initially, Westerners had to stay at a couple of government-designated hotels, such as the People’s Hotel, a Soviet-style domed building constructed in the 1950s. They were confined to visiting particular designated sites: the terra-cotta warriors; a school filled with “happy” children dancing and singing revolutionary songs; and “friendship stores,” where they could buy silk, rugs, and traditional ceramics, with hefty markups and priced in “foreign exchange certificates.” We children were taught to report any foreigner we saw wandering the backstreets, taking pictures. We were told those Westerners wanted to tell lies about China. Even so, I would secretly hang around the People’s Hotel and try to strike up conversations with tourists to practice my English. Each time I got someone talking, we would be surrounded by curious onlookers, most of whom had never heard this strange language. It wasn’t long before someone reported to the school that a classmate of mine had accepted gifts and asked a Japanese man to buy his father foreign-brand cigarettes at the friendship store. We were banned from the People’s Hotel because we had made the government lose face by begging foreigners to buy cigarettes.

By the early 1980s, people had grown more comfortable with the presence of foreign tourists. Associating with them was no longer considered dangerous, and they afforded many opportunities for an enterprising local. Father remained prudent, his customary position whenever rules were relaxed in China. “If the policy changes, your connections with foreigners would ruin the political careers of your siblings,” he warned me.

In the summer of 1985, an English woman who taught at my university wanted to come to Xi’an with me to see how “ordinary people” lived. Father, after much prodding, talked to the company’s Party secretary, who became worried that the relatively poor conditions of our residential complex might tarnish the glorious image of our new socialist China. He recommended I host my teacher at a fancy restaurant downtown, so I lied to him and said the real interest of the teacher was the company because she wanted to learn about socialist production. The Party secretary swallowed this and ordered all the workshops cleaned and walls painted, and hung a big poster at the entrance, saying
WELCOME OUR FOREIGN FRIENDS TO OUR FACTORY AND OFFER GUIDANCE
. My family was moved, temporarily, to a big apartment in a newly constructed building and one of our new “neighbors,” a chef, dropped by to prepare a sumptuous meal. The Party secretary and a group of people I hardly knew showed my teacher around the company. Out of politeness, she feigned interest and asked many questions; her hosts were delighted.

Mother liked the new apartment and refused to move out until the company found us a bigger place to live. The company’s housing committee rejected her request, but Mother wouldn’t give in. Noticing that several neighbors had been assigned new apartments after wining and dining key housing committee members, Mother chose to follow suit, but Father was reluctant to participate, saying that he didn’t drink and wouldn’t know how to entertain those officials, most of whom were big drinkers. Mother recommended I sit at the table to assist Father. On Mother’s insistence, he acquiesced and promised to invite his supervisor and the housing officials over a week after the Lunar New Year. Mother spent a bundle on liquor and meat. The table was set and Father came back with six guests—all of whom were his friends, and none had anything to do with housing. Mother’s face turned ashen. “I tried inviting my boss and other company officials, but no one was available. I didn’t want your efforts to be wasted,” Father explained after Mother had pulled him into the kitchen. “Besides, all these friends have promised to help with the funeral plan.” Mother almost screamed at him. “All you remember is your mother’s funeral. I guess we’ll be stuck living in a pigsty for the rest of our lives.”

Seeing that she could not rely on Father’s support, she set out on her own, pestering individual housing committee members every week until they avoided her like the plague. Her relentless maneuvering paid off and, in the spring of 1985, we were assigned a two-bedroom unit on the first level of a different building with indoor plumbing. Grandma’s chamber pot, once borne with a degree of honor to the communal latrine each night, was ditched, but there was no place for her coffin. Father, who had remained neutral during Mother’s housing campaign, redeemed himself by moving the coffin to a discreet corner of one of the company warehouses, shielded from view by stacks of bricks. Grandma applauded the idea, saying that she did not have to be reminded of her funeral every day.

In 1986, I graduated from the university and became an employee of the government, which reasoned that, having paid for our education, it was entitled to assign graduates jobs until it got back its investment. Before graduation, I was approached about working as an assistant in foreign affairs for an important Communist leader. If I did well, it would put me on the fast track for a career in politics. I telephoned Father and he responded without even a pause. “No,” he said. “If that Communist leader falls from his position, your future will also be ruined.” He had me turn down the assignment and that left me with only one option, which was to return to Xi’an to teach at a local university. Father’s stance cost him: The children of several colleagues landed more glamorous jobs in Beijing and he lost his bragging rights, but he liked that I was home.

Xi’an was a bastion of conservative ideas—many of Mao’s veteran revolutionaries held power there—and it surprised me that, in 1986, it was among the first in the inland regions to embrace the economic and political change that was sweeping the nation. People became obsessed with
zuo sheng yi
, “doing business,” or as Father translated it, “speculation and profiteering.” In his eyes, it was the black market dressed up in gray. Mother regaled me with tales of neighbors who had made fortunes engaging in new capitalistic ventures: The second son of Mr. Hou had gone to the southern city of Guangzhou and brought back several hundred color TVs and refrigerators, which he sold to retail stores in Xi’an. His mother now wore twenty-four-karat gold and boasted about her son all the time. Father interrupted: “If everyone is selling stuff, who’s manufacturing it?” Mother ignored him. Father’s niece sold dumplings and noodles in the Red Lantern District—a vibrant night market that sprang up selling all sorts of Xi’an specialty foods—and made more money at night than she did working her hotel day job. “Your father is so stubborn and incompetent,” Mother complained. “He won’t do anything.”

Like Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in Russia, China introduced market reforms in the mid-1980s by first easing price controls on food and vegetables. The measures led to many problems. “You go out in the morning and the tomatoes are twenty fen a kilo,” Mother said. “You go back in the afternoon, the price is thirty fen
.
What kind of system is this?” She reminded Father that the Communists used to condemn the unbridled inflation of Nationalist rule in the 1940s. Who is creating inflation now? Father told her not to complain, but I could tell he shared her sentiment.

Everyone was doing business because Deng Xiaoping said, “Getting rich is glorious”—everyone that is, except my brother. A former classmate of mine quit his job at Father’s company, went to the coastal cities to purchase trendy clothes, and resold them at a clothing market downtown. He asked my brother—he had a flair for such things—to go into business with him, but Father intervened, threatening to disown him. “Don’t try to embarrass the family. You don’t know how lucky you are to have that job with an iron rice bowl. Those swindlers will be caught sooner or later.” My brother became a top manager at Father’s company in the late 1990s, but the iron rice bowl was broken and the company went bankrupt after state subsidies were withdrawn. He runs a small spin-off company salvaged from the rice-bowl wreckage, but he still blames Father for ruining his chance to be his own man.

Father was entering his phase of complacency; he could breathe a little easier now that his four children were making their own lives. My younger sister worked as an archivist after graduating from night college; my elder sister excelled in her job; I was a teacher and raking in money moonlighting as an English tutor; my brother, though often the target of Father’s frowns, was at least working.

I accepted my fate and eased into my new job at a teacher’s university. Most of my students had grown up in the rural areas in the northwest and had seldom ventured out of their province. They looked up to me—someone who had studied in Shanghai and the UK—as their window to the world. In my Introduction to the English Literature class, I talked to a roomful of more than seventy students about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and even George Orwell. For my Western Culture class, I showed them the tapes of Hollywood movies such as
The Godfather
and played the recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The department’s Party secretary said I was straying from preprepared teaching material and switched me to introductory English language teaching, but my students staged a ministrike and got me back.

It was a profitable time for English teachers all over China, and Xi’an in particular. The unique attraction of its terra-cotta warriors made it a top destination for foreign tourists, who swarmed the streets. Locals soon realized that English was the key to joining this boom. High school graduates wanting a job in one of the many hotels popping up all over the city needed two things: to be at least five foot ten, an important measure of good looks; and have a basic understanding of English. They could do nothing about the former, but they were prepared to pay whatever it cost for the latter. Even the small vendors selling souvenirs wanted English training so they could say, “Cheap, cheap, ten yuan” for one mini-replica of terra-cotta soldiers. Thousands of college students were eyeing graduate schools in the United States and Europe, and competed for the limited number of exit visas the government allowed. Many government officials and company executives found that English was now a requirement for future promotion. As a result, language schools flourished. Even university professors and lecturers who had long held themselves as among the elite residents of the academic ivory tower could not resist the lure of money and anyone with a language qualification was soon “piggybacking” or moonlighting. As a Fudan graduate, I did not come cheap, and I was in such demand that I constantly missed my Wednesday political-study sessions. More than once I walked into a classroom late and taught for an hour oblivious to the fact that they were not my students.

Years of Communist education became like the ancient artifacts inside the tombs of China’s emperors in Xi’an—they crumbled into dust if exposed too long to the open air. “Contributing your wisdom and efforts to the country’s modernization drive” for the country was replaced by earning big bucks for oneself and the Party’s influence faded. Like everyone in China, I dutifully followed the country’s new economic mantra—make money and get rich.

Each payday, I would hand over a wad of cash to Father to lock in the old desk drawer for Grandma’s burial fund. “Didn’t I tell you to study hard and go to college?” Father would lecture my brother. “Without education, you will never make it big.” My brother shot back: “Aren’t you a model worker yourself? Didn’t Chairman Mao say the working class is the vanguard of the Revolution?” Father was at a loss for words. I could tell he was struggling with his belief in the Party. I earned in two months more than he made in a year. The inequality shocked him. Father was not alone in feeling betrayed by the system. He put away the red certificates he had earned over the years. He even took down the old portraits of Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai.

More and more, the health of Grandma, now eighty-four, occupied Father’s mind. In the autumn of 1986, he put her on the back of his bicycle and pedaled to a hospital after seeing blood in her urine. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but the doctor said that, given her advanced age, the tumor wasn’t life threatening and the surgery and chemotherapy would only make what was left of her life extremely uncomfortable. His prescription: “Let nature take its course.” We prepared for the worst. Three months went by and nothing happened physically, but we could tell she was losing her mental faculties and it was painful for me to watch this tough yet caring and considerate woman drift in and out of awareness. In those days, none of us had heard of Alzheimer’s. Father described Grandma’s condition in his own unique way. “Life is a cycle,” he said. “Grandma cared for you when you were a baby. Now that she has become an ‘old child,’ it is time to care for her.”