Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (53 page)

But he had been classified as a 'sympathizer with class enemies," and was never sent on any more raids, which suited him fine.  He soon embarked on a journey with his brotherhood sight-seeing all over the country, taking in China's rivers and mountains, but, unlike most Red Guards, Jin-ming never made the pilgrimage to Peking to see Mao.  He did not come home until the end of ,966.

My sister Xiao-hong, at fifteen, was a founding member of the Red Guards at her school.  But she was only one among hundreds, as the school was crammed with officials' children, many of them competing to be active.  She hated and feared the atmosphere of militancy and violence so much that she was soon on the verge of a nervous collapse.

She came home to ask my parents for help at the beginning of September, only to find they were not there: my father was in detention and my mother had gone to Peking.  My grandmother's anxiety made her even more scared, so she returned to her school.  She volunteered to help 'guard' the school library, which had been ransacked and sealed, like the one at my school.  She spent her days and nights reading, devouring all the forbidden fruits she could.  It was this that held her together.  In mid-September, she set out on a long tour around the country with her friends and like Jin-ming she did not come home until the end of the year.

My brother Xiao-her was almost twelve, and was at the same key primary school I had attended.  When the Red Guards were formed in the middle schools, Xiao-her and his friends were eager to join.  To them the Red Guards meant freedom to live away from home, staying up all night, and power over adults.  They went to my school and begged to be allowed into the Red Guards.  To get rid of them, one Red Guard said  off-handedly, "You can form the First Army Division of Unit 4969."  So Xiao-her became the head of the Propaganda Department of a troop of twenty boys, all the others being 'commander," 'chief of staff," and so on.  There were no privates.

Xiao-her joined in hitting teachers twice.  One of the victims was a sports teacher, who had been condemned as a 'bad element."  Some girls of Xiao-her's age had accused the teacher of touching their breasts and thighs during gym lessons.  So the boys set upon him, not least to impress the girls.  The other teacher was the moral tutor.  As corporal punishment was banned in schools, she would complain to the parents, who would beat their sons.

One day, the boys set out on a house raid, and were assigned to go to a household which was rumored to be that of an ex-Kuomintang family. They did not know what exactly they were supposed to do there.  Their heads had been filled with vague notions of finding something like a diary saying how the family longed for Chiang Kai-shek's comeback and hated the Communist Party.

The family had five sons, all well-built and tough looking  They stood by the door, arms akimbo, and looked down at the boys with their most intimidating stares.  Only one boy attempted to tiptoe in.  One of the sons picked him up by the scruff of his neck and threw him out with one hand.  This put an end to any further such 'revolutionary actions' by Xiao-her's 'division."

So, in the second week of October, while Xiao-her was living at his school and enjoying his freedom, Jin-ming and my sister were away traveling, and my mother and grandmother were in Peking, I was alone at home when one day, without warning, my father appeared on the doorstep.

It was an eerily quiet homecoming.  My father was a changed person.  He was abstracted and sunk deep in thought, and did not say where he had been or what had been happening to him.  I listened to him pacing his room through sleepless nights, too frightened and worried to sleep myself.  Two days later, to my tremendous relief, my mother returned from Peking with my grandmother and Xiao-fang.

My mother immediately went to my father's department and handed Tao Zhu's letter to a deputy director.  Straight away, my father was sent to a health clinic.  My mother was allowed to go with him."

I went there to see them.  It was a lovely place in the country, bordered on two sides by a beautiful green brook.

My father had a suite with a sitting room in which there was a row of empty bookshelves, a bedroom with a large double bed, and a bathroom with shiny white files.  Outside his balcony, several osmanthus trees spread an intoxicating scent.  When the breeze blew, tiny golden blossoms floated softly down to the grass less earth.

Both my parents seemed peaceful.  My mother told me they went fishing in the brook every day.  I felt they were safe, so I told them I was planning to leave for Peking to see Chairman Mao.  I had longed to make this trip, like almost everybody else.  But I had not gone because I felt I should be around to give my parents support.

Making the pilgrimage to Peking was very much encouraged and food, accommodations, and transport were all free.  But it was not organized. I left Chengdu two days later with the five other girls from the reception office.  As the train whistled north, my feelings were a mixture of excitement and nagging disquiet about my father.  Outside the window, on the Chengdu Plain, some rice fields had been harvested, and squares of black soil shone among the gold, forming a rich patchwork.  The countryside had been only marginally affected by the upheavals, in spite of repeated instigations by the Cultural Revolution Authority led by Mme Mao.  Mao wanted the population fed so that they could 'make revolution," so he did not give his wife his full backing. The peasants knew that if they got involved and stopped producing food, they would be the first to starve, as they had learned in the famine only a few years before.  The cottages among the green bamboo groves seemed as peaceful and idyllic as ever.  The wind gently swayed the lingering smoke to form a crown over the graceful bamboo tips and the concealed chimneys.  It was less than five months since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but my world had changed completely.  I gazed out at the quiet beauty of the plain, and let a wistful mood envelop me.  Fortunately, I did not have to worry about being criticized for being 'nostalgic," which was considered bourgeois, as none of the other girls had an accusing turn of mind.  With them, I felt I could relax.

The prosperous Chengdu Plain soon gave way to low hills.  The snowy mountains of west Sichuan glistened in the distance.  Before very long we were traveling in and out of the tunnels through the towering Qjn Mountains, the wild range that cuts Sichuan off from the north of China.

With Tibet to the west, the hazardous Yangtze Gorges to the east, and the southern neighbors considered barbarians, Sichuan had always been rather self-contained, and the Sichuanese were known for their independent spirit.  Mao had been concerned about their legendary inclination to seek some margin of independence, and had always made sure the province was in the firm grip of Peking.

After the Qjn Mountains, the scenery became dramatically different. The soft greenness gave way to harsh yellow earth, and the thatched cottages of the Chengdu Plain were replaced by rows of dry mud cave-huts.  It was in caves like these that my father had spent five years as a young man.

We were only a hundred miles from Yan'an, where Mao had set up his headquarters after the Long March.  It was there that my father dreamed his youthful dreams and became a devoted Communist.  Thinking of him, my eyes became moist.

The journey took two days and a night.  The attendants came to talk to us often and told us how envious they were that we would be seeing Chairman Mao soon.

At Peking Station huge slogans welcomed us as "Chairman Mao's guests." It was after midnight, yet the square in front of the station was lit ~up like daytime.  Searchlights swept through the thousands and thousands of young people, all wearing red armbands and speaking often mutually unintelligible dialects.  They were talking, shouting, giggling, and quarrelling against the background of a gigantic chunk of stolid Soviet-style architecture the station itself.  The only Chinese features were the pastiche pavilion like roofs on the two clock towers at each end.

As I stumbled drowsily out into the searchlights, I was enormously impressed by the building, its ostentatious grandeur and its shiny marbled modernity.  I had been used to traditional dark timber columns and rough brick walls.

I looked back, and with a surge of emotion saw a huge portrait of Mao hanging in the center, under three golden characters, "Peking Station," in his calligraphy.

Loudspeakers directed us to the reception rooms in a corner of the station.  In Peking, as in every other city in China, administrators were appointed to arrange food and accommodations for the traveling youngsters.  Dormitories in universities, schools, hotels, and even offices were pressed into service.  After waiting on line for hours, we were assigned to Qinghua University, one of the most prestigious in the country.  We were taken there by coach and told that food would be provided in the canteen.  The running of the gigantic machine for the millions of traveling youngsters was overseen by Zhou Enlai, who dealt with the daily chores with which Mao could not be bothered.

Without Zhou or somebody like him, the country and with it the Cultural Revolution would have collapsed, and Mao let it be known that Zhou was not to be attacked.

We were a very serious group, and all we wanted to do was to see Chairman Mao.  Unfortunately, we had just missed his fifth review of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square.  What were we to do?  Leisure activities and sightseeing were out irrelevant to the revolution.  So we spent all our time on the campus copying wall posters.  Mao had said that one purpose of traveling was to 'exchange information about the Cultural Revolution." That was what we would do: bring the slogans of the Peking Red Guards back to Chengdu.

Actually, there was another reason for not going out: transport was impossibly crowded and the university was out in the suburbs, about ten miles from the city center.

Still, we had to tell ourselves that our disinclination to move was correctly motivated.

Staying on the campus was intensely uncomfortable.

Even today I can still smell the latrines down the corridor from our room, which were so blocked that the water from the washbasins and urine and loosened excrement from the toilets flooded the tiled floor. Fortunately, the doorway to the latrines had a ridge, which prevented the stinking overflow from invading the corridor.  The university administration was paralyzed, so there was nobody to get repairs done. But children from the countryside were still using the toilets: manure was not considered untouchable by peasants.  When they trudged out, their shoes left highly odorous stains along the corridor and in the rooms.

A week passed, and still there was no news of another rally at which we could see Mao.  Subconsciously desperate to get away from our discomfort, we decided to go to Shanghai to visit the site where the Communist Party had been founded in 192l, and then on to Mao's birthplace in Hunan, in south-central China.

These pilgrimages turned out to be hell: the trains were unbelievably packed.  The dominance of the Red Guards by high officials' children was coming to an end, because their parents were beginning to come under attack as capitalist-roaders.  The oppressed 'blacks' and 'grays' began to organize their own Red Guard groups and to travel.  The color codes were beginning to lose their meaning.  I remember meeting on one train a very beautiful, slim girl of about eighteen, with unusually big, velvet black eyes and long, thick eyelashes.  As was the custom, we started by asking each other what 'family background' we were from.  I was amazed at the unembarrassed manner with which this lovely girl replied that she was a 'black."  And she seemed confidently to be expecting us 'red' girls to be friendly with her.

The six of us were very un militant in our behavior, and our seats were always the center of boisterous chatting.

The oldest member of our group was eighteen, and she was particularly popular.  Everyone called her "Plumpie," as she was very well padded all around.  She laughed a lot, with a deep, chesty, operatic sound. She sang a lot too, but, of course, only songs of Chairman Mao's quotations.

All songs except these and a few in praise of Mao were banned, like all other forms of entertainment, and remained so for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

This was the happiest I had been since the start of the Cultural Revolution, in spite of the persistent worry about my father and the agony involved in traveling.  Every inch of space in the trains was occupied, even the luggage racks.

The toilet was jam-packed: no one could get in.  Only our determination to see the holy sites of China sustained us.

Once, I desperately needed to relieve myself.  I was sitting squeezed up next to a window, because five people were crammed onto a narrow seat made for three.  With an incredible struggle I reached the toilet but when I got there I decided it was impossible to use it.  Even if the boy who sat on the lid of the tank with his feet on the toilet seat cover could lift his legs for one moment, even if the girl who sat between his feet could somehow manage to be held up briefly by the others filling every usable space around her, I could not bring myself to do it in front of all these boys and girls.  I returned to my seat on the verge of tears.  Panic worsened the bursting sensation, and my legs were shaking.  I resolved to use the toilet at the next stop.

After what seemed an interminable time, the train stopped at a small, dusk-enveloped station.  The window was opened and I clambered out, but when I came back I found I could not get in.

I was perhaps the least athletic of us six.  Previously, whenever I had had to climb into a train through the window, one of my friends had always lifted me from the platform while others pulled me from inside. This time, although I was being helped by about four people from inside, I could not hoist my body high enough to get my head and elbows in.  I was sweating like mad, even though it was freezing cold.  At this point, the train started to pull away.  Panicking, I looked around to see if there was anyone who could help.  My eyes fell on the thin, dark face of a boy who had sidled up beside me.  But his intention was not to lend me a hand.