Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (49 page)

It was renamed "The Whiff of Gunpowder."

Traffic was in confusion for several days.  For red to mean 'stop' was considered impossibly counter revolutionary.  It should of course mean 'go."  And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left.  For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves.  I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left.  In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos.  In the end, the old rules reasserted themselves, owing to Zhou Enlai, who managed to convince the Peking Red Guard leaders.  But the youngsters found justifications for this: I was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep to the right to show our anti-imperialist spirit.  She did not mention America.

As a child I had always shied away from collective activity.  Now, at fourteen, I felt even more averse to it.  I suppressed this dread because of the constant sense of guilt I had come to feel, through my education, when I was out of step with Mao.  I kept telling myself that I must train my thoughts according to the new revolutionary theories and practices.  If there was anything I did not understand, I must reform myself and adapt.  However, I found myself trying very hard to avoid militant acts such as stopping passers by and cutting their long hair, or narrow trouser legs, or skirts, or breaking their semi-high-heeled shoes.

These things had now become signs of bourgeois decadence, according to the Peking Red Guards.

My own hair came to the critical attention of my schoolmates.  I had to have it cut to the level of my earlobes.

Secretly, though much ashamed of myself for being so 'petty bourgeois," I shed tears over losing my long plaits.

As a young child, my nurse had a way of doing my hair which made it stand up on top of my head like a willow branch.  She called it 'fireworks shooting up to the sky."

Until the early 1960s I wore my hair in two coils, with rings of little silk flowers wound around them.  In the mornings, while I hurried through my breakfast, my grandmother or our maid would be doing my hair with loving hands.  Of all the colors for the silk flowers, my favorite was pink.

After 1964, following Mao's calls for an austere lifestyle, more suited to the atmosphere of class struggle, I put patches on my trousers to try to look 'proletarian' and wore my hair in the uniform style of two plaits with no colors, but long hair had not been condemned as yet.  My grandmother cut it for me, muttering all the while.  Her hair survived, because she never went out at that time.

The famous teahouses in Chengdu also came under attack as 'decadent." I did not understand why, but did not ask.  In the summer of 1966 I learned to suppress my sense of reason.  Most Chinese had been doing that for a long time.

A Sichuan teahouse is a unique place.  It usually sits in the embrace of a bamboo grove or under the canopy of a large tree.  Around the low, square wooden tables are bamboo armchairs which give out a faint aroma even after years of use.  To prepare the tea a pinch of tea leaves is dropped into a cup and boiling water is poured on top.

Then a lid is sunk loosely onto the cup, allowing the steam to seep through the gap, bringing out the fragrance of the jasmine or other blossoms.  Sichuan has many kinds of tea.

Jasmine alone has five grades.

Teahouses are as important to the Sichuanese as pubs are to the British.  Older men, in particular, spend a lot of time there, puffing their long-stemmed pipes over a cup of tea and a plateful of nuts and melon seeds.  The waiter shuttles between the seats with a kettle of hot water which he pours from a couple of feet away with pinpoint accuracy.

A skillful waiter makes the water level higher than the edge of the cup without it spilling over.  As a child I was always mesmerized watching the water fall from the spout.  I was rarely taken to a teahouse, though.  It had an air of indulgence of which my parents disapproved.

Like European cafes, a Sichuan teahouse provides newspapers on bamboo frames.  Some customers go there to read, but it is primarily a place to meet and chat, exchanging news and gossip.  There is often entertainment storytelling punctuated with wooden clappers.

Perhaps because they had an aura of leisure, and if people were sitting in one they were not out making revolution, teahouses had to be closed. I went with a couple of dozen pupils between thirteen and sixteen years old, most of whom were Red Guards, to a small one on the bank of the Silk River.  Chairs and tables were spread outside under a Chinese scholar tree.  The summer evening breeze from the river fanned out a heavy scent from the clusters of white blossoms.  The customers, mostly men, raised their heads from their chessboards as we approached along the uneven cobblestones that paved the bank.  We stopped under the tree.  A few voices from our group started to shout: "Pack up!  Pack up!  Don't linger in this bourgeois place!"  A boy from my form snatched a corner of the paper chessboard on the nearest table and jerked it away.  The wooden pieces scattered on the ground.

The men who had been playing were quite young.  One of them lunged forward, his fists clenched, but his friend quickly pulled the corner of his jacket.  Silently they began to pick up the chess pieces.  The boy who had jerked away their board shouted: "No more chess playing! Don't you know it is a bourgeois habit?"  He stooped to sweep up a handful of pieces and threw them toward the river.

I had been brought up to be courteous and respectful to anyone older than me, but now to be revolutionary meant being aggressive and militant.  Gentleness was considered 'bourgeois."  I was repeatedly criticized for it, and it was one reason given for not allowing me into the Red Guards.

Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying 'thank you' too often, which was branded as 'bourgeois hypocrisy'; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.

But now, outside the teahouse, I could see that most of us, including the Red Guards, were uneasy about the new style of speaking and lording it over others.  Not many of us opened our mouths.  Quietly, a few started to paste rectangular slogans onto the walls of the teahouse and the trunk of the scholar tree.

The customers silently began to walk away along the bank.  Watching their disappearing figures, a feeling of loss overwhelmed me.  A couple of months before, these adults probably would have told us to get lost. But now they knew that Mao's backing had given the Red Guards power.

Thinking back, I can see the thrill some children must have felt at demonstrating their power over adults.  A popular Red Guard slogan went: "We can soar to heaven, and pierce the earth, because our Great Leader Chairman Mao is our supreme commander!"  As this declaration reveals, the Red Guards were not enjoying genuine freedom of self-expression.  From the start they were nothing but the tool of a tyrant.

Standing on the riverbank in August 1966, though, I was just confused. I went into the teahouse with my fellow pupils.  Some asked the manager to close down.  Others started pasting slogans on the walls.  Many customers were getting up to go, but in a far corner one old man was still sitting at his table, calmly sipping his tea.  I stood beside him, feeling embarrassed that I was supposed to assume the voice of authority.  He looked at me, and resumed his noisy sipping.  He had a deeply lined face that was almost stereotypical 'working class' as shown in propaganda pictures.  His hands reminded me of one of my textbook stories which described the hands of an old peasant: they could bundle thorny firewood without feeling any pain.

Perhaps this old man was very sure of his unquestionable background, or his advanced age, which had hitherto been the object of respect, or perhaps he simply did not think I was very impressive.  Anyway, he remained in his seat taking no notice of me.  I summoned up my courage and pleaded in a low voice, "Please, could you leave?"  Without looking at me, he said, "Where to?"

"Home, of course," I replied.  He turned to face me.  There was emotion in his voice, though he spoke quietly.

"Home?  What home?  I share a tiny room with my two grandsons.  I have a corner surrounded by a bamboo curtain.  Just for the bed.  That's all.  When the kids are home I come here for some peace and quiet.  Why do you have to take this away from me?"

His words filled me with shock and shame.  This was the first time I had heard a first hand account of such miserable living conditions.  I turned and walked away.

This teahouse, like all the others in Sichuan, was shut for fifteen years until 198x, when Deng Xiaoping's reforms decreed it could be reopened.  In 1985 I went back there with a British friend.  We sat under the scholar tree.

An old waitress came to fill our cups with a kettle from two feet away. Around us, people were playing chess.  It was one of the happiest moments of that trip back.

When Lin Biao called for everything that represented the old culture to be destroyed, some pupils in my school started to smash things up. Being more than 2,000 years old, the school had a lot of antiques and was therefore a prime site for action.  The school gateway had an old tiled roof with carved eaves.  These were hammered to pieces.

The same happened to the sweeping blue-glazed roof of the big temple which had been used as a ping-pong hall.

The pair of giant bronze incense burners in front of the temple were toppled, and some boys urinated into them.

In the back garden, pupils with big hammers and iron rods went along the sandstone bridges casually breaking the little statues.  On one side of the sports field was a pair of towering rectangular tablets made of red sandstone, each twenty feet high.  Some lines about Confucius were carved on them in beautiful calligraphy.  A huge rope was tied around them, and two gangs pulled.  It took them a couple of days, as the foundations were deep.  They had to get some workers from outside to dig a hole around the tablets.

When the monuments finally crashed down amidst cheers, they lifted part of the path that ran behind them.

All the things I loved were disappearing.  The saddest thing of all for me was the ransacking of the library: the golden filed roof, the delicately sculpted windows, the blue painted chairs .... Bookshelves were turned upside down, and some pupils tore books to pieces just for the hell of it.

Afterward, X-shaped white paper strips with black characters were stuck on what was left of the doors and windows to signal that the building was sealed.

Books were major targets of Mao's order to destroy.

Because they had not been written within the last few months, and therefore did not quote Mao on every page, some Red Guards declared that they were all 'poisonous weeds."  With the exception of Marxist classics and the works of Stalin, Mao, and the late Lu Xun, whose name Mme Mao was using for her personal vendettas, books were burning all across China.  The country lost most of its written heritage.  Many of the books which survived later went into people's stoves as fuel.

But there was no bonfire at my school.  The head of the school Red Guards had been a very conscientious student.

A rather feminine-looking seventeen-year-old, he had been made the Red Guard leader because his father was the Party chief for the province, rather than because of his own ambition.  While he could not prevent the general vandalism, he did manage to stop the books from being burned.

Like everyone else, I was supposed to join in the 'revolutionary actions."  But I, like most pupils, was able to avoid them, because the destruction was not organized, and no one made sure we took part.  I could see that many pupils hated the whole thing, but nobody tried to stop it.  Like myself, many boys and girls may well have been telling themselves that they were wrong to feel sorry about the destruction and needed to reform.  But subconsciously we all knew we would have been crushed instantly had we raised any objection.

By then 'denunciation meetings' were becoming a major feature of the Cultural Revolution.  They involved a hysterical crowd and were seldom without physical brutality.

Peking University had taken the lead, under the personal supervision of Mao.  At its first denunciation meeting, on 18 June, over sixty professors and heads of departments, including the chancellor, were beaten, kicked, and forced to kneel for hours.  Dunce caps with humiliating slogans were forced onto their heads.  Ink was poured over their faces to make them black, the color of evil, and slogans were pasted all over their bodies.  Two students gripped the arms of each victim, twisting them around behind his back and pushing them up with such ferocity as almost to dislocate them.  This posture was called the 'jet plane," and soon became a feature of most denunciation meetings all over the country.

I was once called by the Red Guards in my form to attend such a meeting.  Horror made me feel very chilly in the hot summer afternoon when I saw a dozen or so teachers standing on the platform on the sports ground, with their heads bent and their arms twisted into the 'jet plane' position.  Then, some were kicked on the back of their knees and forced to kneel, while others, including my English-language teacher, an elderly man with the fine manner of a classical gentleman, were forced to stand on long, narrow benches.  He found it hard to keep his balance, and swayed and fell, cutting his forehead on the sharp corner of a bench.  A Red Guard standing next to him instinctively stooped and extended his hands to help, but immediately straightened up and assumed an exaggeratedly harsh posture, with his fists clenched, yelling: "Get back onto the bench!"  He did not want to be seen as soft on a 'class enemy."  Blood trickled down the teacher's forehead and coagulated on the side of his face.