Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (43 page)

On summer evenings, boys from the huts in the alley often used to walk through the streets peddling anti mosquito incense.  They sang a special tune to attract attention to their wares.  My evening reading used to be punctuated by this lingering, sad tune.  Through my father's constant reminding, I knew that being able to study undisturbed in a big, cool room with a parquet floor and mosquito-netted open windows was an enormous privilege.

"You must not think you are superior to them," he would say.

"You are just lucky to be here.  You know why we need communism?  So that everyone can live in a good house like ours, and in much better ones."

My father said things like this so often that I grew up feeling ashamed of my privileges.  Sometimes boys from the compound would stand on their balconies and mimic the tune the young peddlers sang.  I felt ashamed when they did this.  When I went out with my father in his car, I was always embarrassed when the car honked through the crowds.  If people stared into the car, I would sink down in my seat and try to avoid their gaze.

In my early teens I was a very serious girl.  I liked to be on my own, thinking, often about moral issues that confused me.  I had become rather lukewarm about games and fairgrounds and playing with other children, and rarely gossiped with other girls.  Although I was sociable and popular, there always seemed to be a certain distance between me and the others.  In China people easily become familiar with one another, particularly women.  But ever since I was a child, I have always wanted to be left alone.

My father noticed this side of my character, and would comment on it with approval.  While my teachers constantly said I should have more 'collective spirit," he told me that familiarity and living on top of each other could be a destructive thing.  With this encouragement, I kept my privacy and my space.  There are no exact words for these two concepts in the Chinese language, but they were instinctively yearned for by many, certainly by my siblings as well as me.  Jin-ming, for instance, insisted so strongly on being allowed to lead his own life that he was sometimes thought by those who did not know him to be antisocial; in fact he was gregarious and extremely popular with his peers.

My father often said to us, "I think it is marvelous that your mother has this policy of "letting you roam free on the pasture."  Our parents left us alone and respected our need to keep our separate worlds.

14.  "Father Is Close, Mother Is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao' The Cult of Mao (1964-1965)

"Chairman Mao," as we always called him, began to impinge directly on my life in 1964, when I was twelve.

Having been in retreat for some time after the famine, he was starting his comeback, and in March of the previous year he had issued a call to the whole country, particularly the young, to 'learn from Lei Feng."

Lei Feng was a soldier who, we were told, had died at the age of twenty-two in 1962.  He had done an awful lot of good deeds going out of his way a help the elderly, the sick, and the needy.  He had donated his savings to disaster relief funds and given up his food rations to comrades in the hospital.

Lei Feng soon began to dominate my life.  Every afternoon we left school to 'do good deeds like Lei Feng."  We went down to the railway station to try to help old ladies with their luggage, as Lei Feng had done.  We sometimes had to grab their bundles from them forcibly because some countrywomen thought we were thieves.  On rainy days, I stood on the street with an umbrella, anxiously hoping that an old lady would pass by and give me an opportunity to escort her home as Lei Feng had done.  If I saw someone carrying water buckets on a shoulder pole old houses still did not have running water t would try unsuccessfully to summon up the courage to offer my help, although I had no idea how heavy a load of water was.

Gradually, during the course of 1964, the emphasis began to shift from boy scoutish good deeds to the cult of Mao.  The essence of Lei Feng, the teachers told us, was his 'boundless love and devotion to Chairman Mao."

Before he took any action, Lei Feng always thought of some words of Mao's.  His diary was published and became our moral textbook.  On almost every page there was a pledge like: "I must study Chairman Mao's works, heed Chairman Mao's words, follow Chairman Mao's instructions, and be a good soldier of Chairman Mao's."  We vowed to follow Lei Feng, and be ready to 'go up mountains of knives and down seas of flames," to 'have our bodies smashed to powder and our bones crushed to smithereens," to 'submit ourselves unquestioningly to the control of the Great Leader' Mao.  The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two sides of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality.

I read my first article by Mao in 1964, at a time when two slogans of Mao's - "Serve the People' and "Never Forget Class Struggle' dominated our lives.  The essence of these two complementary slogans was illustrated in Lei Feng's poem "The Four Seasons," which we all learned by heart:

Like spring, I treat my comrades warmly.

Like summer, I am full of ardor for my revolutionary work.

The Cult of ,"rlao I eliminate my individualism as an autumn gale sweeps away fallen leaves, And to the class enemy, I am cruel and ruthless like harsh winter.

In line with this, our teacher said we had to be careful whom we helped on our do-good errands.  We must not help 'class enemies."  But I did not understand who they were, and when I asked, neither the teachers nor my parents were keen to elaborate.  One common answer was:

'like the baddies in the movies."  But I could not see anyone around me who looked like the highly stylized enemy characters in the movies. This posed a big problem.  I no longer felt sure about seizing bags from old ladies.  I could not possibly ask, "Are you a class enemy?"

We sometimes went to clean the houses in an alley next to our school. In one house there was a young man who used to lounge on a bamboo chair watching us with a cynical smile as we toiled away on his windows.  Not only did he not offer to help, he even wheeled his bicycle out of the shed and suggested we clean that for him as well.

"What a pity," he once said, 'that you are not the real Lei Feng, and that there are no photographers on hand to take your pictures for the newspapers."  (Lei Feng's good deeds were miraculously recorded by an official photographer.) We all hated the lounger with the dirty bicycle.  Could he be a class enemy?  But we knew he worked at a machinery factory, and workers, we had been repeatedly told, were the best, the leading class in our revolution.  I was confused.

One of the things I had been doing was helping to push carts on the streets after school.  The carts were often piled high with cement blocks or chunks of sandstone.  They were terribly heavy, and every step was an enormous effort for the men who pulled them.  Even in cold weather, some would be bare-chested, and shiny beads of sweat trickled down their faces and backs.  If the road was even slightly uphill, it was very hard for some of them to keep going.

Whenever I saw them, I was attacked by a wave of sadness.

Since the campaign to learn from Lei Feng had started, I had stood by a ramp waiting for carts to pass.  I would be exhausted after helping to push just one of them.  As I left off, the man pulling would give me an almost imperceptible sideways smile, trying not to break his stride and lose momentum.

One day a classmate said to me in a very serious tone of voice that most of the people pulling carts were class enemies who had been assigned to do hard labor.  Therefore, she told me, it was wrong to help them.  I asked my teacher, since I, in accordance with Chinese tradition, always turned to teachers for authority.  But instead of her normal air of confidence, she looked unsettled and said she did not know the answer, which puzzled me.  In fact, it was actually true that people pulling carts had often been assigned the job because they had Kuomintang links, or because they were victims of one of the political purges.

My teacher obviously did not want to tell me this, but she did ask me to stop helping to push carts.  From then on, every time I happened on a cart in the street, I averted my eyes from the bent figure trudging along and quickly walked away with a heavy heart.

To fill us with hatred for class enemies, the schools started regular sessions of 'recalling bitterness and reflecting on happiness," at which older people would tell us about the miseries of pre-Communist China.  Our generation had been born 'under the red flag' in new China, and had no idea what life was like under the Kuomintang.

Lei Feng had, we were taught, which was why he could hate the class enemies so deeply and love Chairman Mao with all his heart.  When he was seven, his mother was supposed to have hanged herself after being raped by a landlord.

Workers and peasants came to give talks at our school:

we heard of childhoods dominated by starvation, freezing winters with no shoes, and premature, painful deaths.  They

told us how boundlessly grateful they were to Chairman Mao for saving their lives and giving them food and clothing. One speaker was a member of an ethnic group called the Yi, who had a system of slavery until the late 195os.

He had been a slave and showed us scars from appalling beatings under his previous masters.  Every time the speakers described the hardships they had endured the packed hall was shaken by sobs.  I came out of these sessions feeling devastated at what the Kuomintang had done, and passionately devoted to Mao.

To show us what life without Mao would be like, every now and then the school canteen cooked something called a 'bitterness meal," which was supposed to be what poor people had to eat under the Kuomintang.  It was composed of strange herbs, and I secretly wondered whether the cooks were playing a practical joke on us it was truly unspeakable. The first couple of times I vomited.

One day we were taken to an exhibition of 'class education' about Tibet: on display were photos of dungeons crawling with scorpions, and horrific instruments of torture, including a tool for scooping out eyes and knives for cutting the tendons in the ankles.  A man in a wheelchair who came to our school to give a talk told us he was a former serf from Tibet who had had his ankle tendons severed for some trivial offense.

Since 1964, large houses had also been opened as 'museums of class education' to show how class enemies like landlords had lived in luxury on the sweat and blood of the peasants before Mao came.  During the holiday for Chinese New Year in 1965, my father took us to a famous mansion two and a half hours' drive from home.  Underneath the political justification, the journey was really an excuse for an outing to the countryside in early spring, in accordance with the Chinese tradition of 'walking on the tender green' (ta-qing) to welcome the season.  This was one of the few occasions that my family ever went on a trip out to the country.

As the car drove across the green Chengdu Plain along the eucalyptus-lined asphalt road, I looked intently out of the window at the lovely bamboo groves embracing the farmhouses, and the curving smoke lingering above the thatched cottages peeping between the bamboo leaves.

Occasionally, a branch of early plum blossom was reflected in the streams that meandered around almost every thicket.

My father had asked us all to write an essay after the trip, describing the scenery, and I observed everything with great care.  There was one sight which puzzled me: the few trees dotted around the fields were completely stripped of their branches and leaves except for the very top, and looked like bare flagpoles with a cap of green.  My father explained that firewood was scarce on the densely cultivated Chengdu Plain, and that the peasants had cut off as many branches as they could reach.  What he did not tell me was that there had been many more trees until a few years before, but most of them had been cut down to feed the furnaces to produce steel during the Great Leap Forward.

The countryside seemed extremely prosperous.  The market town where we stopped for lunch was teeming with peasants in bright new clothes, the older ones wearing shiny white turbans and clean dark-blue aprons. Golden roast ducks glowed in the windows of the packed restaurants. Deliciously scented clouds burst out of the lids of huge bamboo steamers in the stalls on the crowded streets.  Our car crawled through the market to the local government offices, which were in a mansion with two stone lions squatting outside the gate.  My father had lived in this county during the famine in 196I, and now, four years later, the local officials wanted to show him how much had changed.  They took us to a restaurant where a private room had been reserved for us.  As we squeezed through the crowded restaurant the peasants stared at us, obvious outsiders ushered in respectfully by the local bosses.  I saw that the tables were covered with strange, mouth-watering dishes.  I had hardly ever eaten anything except what we were given in our  canteen, and the food in this market town was full of lovely surprises.  It had novel names too: "Pearl Balls,"

"Three Gunshots," "Lions' Heads."  Afterward the manager of the restaurant said goodbye to us on the pavement while the local peasants gawked at our entourage.

On the way to the museum, our car overtook an open truck with some boys and girls from my school in it.  They were obviously going to the 'class-education' mansion as well.  One of my teachers was standing on the back.  She smiled at me, and I shrank down in my seat with embarrassment at the difference between our chauffeur-driven car and the open truck on the bumpy road in the cold early spring air.  My father was sitting in front with my youngest brother on his lap.  He recognized my teacher and smiled back at her.  When he turned around to attract my attention, he saw that I had completely disappeared.  He beamed with pleasure.  My embarrassment showed my good qualities, he said; it was good that I felt ashamed of privilege rather than flaunting it.