Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (54 page)

I had my purse in a pocket of my jacket, and because of my climbing position it was quite visible.  With two fingers, the boy picked it out.  He had presumably chosen the moment of departure to snatch it.  I burst out crying.  The boy paused.  He looked at me, hesitated, and put the purse back.  Then he took hold of my right leg and hoisted me up. I landed on the table as the train was beginning to pick up speed.

Because of this incident, I developed a soft spot for adolescent pickpockets.  In the coming years of the Cultural Revolution, when the economy was in a shambles, theft was widespread, and I once lost a whole year's food coupons.  But whenever I heard that policemen or other custodians of' law and order' had beaten a pickpocket, I always felt a pang.  Perhaps the boy on that winter platform had shown more humanity than the hypocritical pillars of society.

Altogether we traveled about 2,000 miles on this trip, in a state of exhaustion such as I had never experienced in my life.  We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine.  It was rather grand quite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be.  A cap ton underneath an enormous photograph of Mao's mother said that she had been a very kind person and, because her family was relatively well off, had often given food to the poor.  So our Great Leader's parents had been rich peasants!  But rich peasants were class enemies!  Why were Chairman Mao's parents heroes when other class enemies were objects of hate? The question frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it..

When we got back to Peking in mid-November, the capital was freezing. The reception offices were no longer at the station, because the area was too small for the huge number of youngsters now pouring in.  A truck took us to a park where we spent the whole night waiting for accommodations to be allocated.  We could not sit down because the ground was covered with frost and it was unbearably cold.  I dozed off for a second or two standing up.  I was not used to the harsh Peking winter and, having left home in the autumn, had not brought any winter clothes with me.  The wind cut through my bones, and the night seemed never-ending.  So did the line.  It meandered around and around the ice-covered lake in the middle of the park.

Dawn came and went and we were still in line, absolutely exhausted.  It was not until dusk fell that we reached our accommodations: the Central Drama School.  Our room had once been used for singing classes.  Now there were two rows of straw mattresses on the floor, no sheets or pillows.  We were met by some air force officers, who said they had been sent by Chairman Mao to look after us and give us military training.  We all felt very moved by the concern Chairman Mao showed us.

Military training for the Red Guards was a new development.  Mao had decided to put a brake on the random destruction which he had unleashed.  The hundreds of Red Guards lodged in the Drama School were organized into a 'regiment' by the air force officers.  We struck up a good relationship with them, and liked two officers in particular, whose family backgrounds we learned at once, as was customary.  The company commander had been a peasant from the north, while the political commissar came from an intellectual's family in the famous garden city of Suzhou.  One day they proposed taking the six of us to the zoo, but asked us not to tell the others because their jeep could not hold any more people.  Besides, they implied, they were not supposed to divert us to activities irrelevant to the Cultural Revolution.  Not wanting to get them into trouble we declined, saying we wanted to 'stick to making revolution."  The two officers brought us bagfuls of big ripe apples, which were seldom seen in Chengdu, and bunches of toffee-coated water chestnuts, which we had all heard of as a great Peking speciality.  To repay their kindness, we sneaked into their bedroom and collected their dirty clothes, then washed them with great enthusiasm.  I remember struggling with the big khaki uniforms, which were extremely heavy and hard in the icy water.  Mao had told the people to learn from the armed forces, because he wanted everyone to be as regimented and indoctrinated with loyalty to him alone as the army was.  Learning from servicemen had gone hand in hand with the promotion of affection for them, and numerous books, articles, songs, and dances featured girls helping soldiers by washing their clothes.

I even washed their underpants, but nothing sexual ever entered my mind.  I suppose many Chinese girls of my generation were too dominated by the crushing political upheavals to develop adolescent sexual feelings.  But not all.  The disappearance of parental control meant it was a time of promiscuity for some.  When I got back home I heard about a former classmate of mine, a pretty girl of fifteen, who went off traveling with some Red Guards from Peking.  She had an affair on the way and came back pregnant.  She was beaten by her father, followed by the accusing eyes of the neighbors, and enthusiastically gossiped about by her comrades.  She hanged herself, leaving a note saying she was 'too ashamed to live."  No one challenged this medieval concept of shame, which might have been a target of a genuine cultural revolution.  But it was never one of Mao's concerns, and was not among the 'olds' which the Red Guards were encouraged to destroy.

The Cultural Revolution also produced a large number of militant puritans, mostly young women.  Another girl from my form once received a love letter from a boy of sixteen.  She wrote back calling him 'a traitor to the revolution': "How dare you think about such shameless things when the class enemies are still rampant, and people in the capitalist world still live in an abyss of misery!"  Such a style was affected by many of the girls I knew.  Because Mao called for girls to be militant, femininity was condemned in the years when my generation was growing up.  Many girls tried to talk, walk, and act like aggressive, crude men, and ridiculed those who did not.  There was not much possibility of expressing femininity anyway.  To start with, we were not allowed to wear anything but the shapeless blue, grey or green trousers and jackets.

Our air force officers drilled us round and round the Drama School's basketball courts every day.  Next to the courts was the canteen.  My eyes used to steal toward it as soon as we formed up, even if I had just finished breakfast.

I was obsessed with food, although I was not sure whether this was due to the lack of meat, or the cold, or the boredom of the drilling.  I dreamed of the variety of Sichuan cuisine, of crispy duckling, sweet-and-sour fish, "Drunken Chicken," and dozens of other succulent delicacies.

None of us six girls was used to having money.  We also thought that buying things was somehow 'capitalist."  So, in spite of my obsession with food, I only bought one bunch of toffee-coated water chestnuts, after my appetite for them had been whetted by the ones our officers gave us.  I resolved to give myself this treat after a great deal of agonizing and consultation with the other girls.  When I got home after the trip I immediately devoured some stale biscuits, while handing my grandmother the almost untouched money she had given me.  She pulled me into her arms and kept saying, "What a silly girl!"

I also returned home with rheumatism.  Peking was so cold that water froze in the taps.  Yet I was drilling, in the open, without an overcoat.  There was no hot water to warm up our icy feet.  When we first arrived, we were given a blanket each.  Some days later, more girls arrived, but there were no more blankets.  We decided to give them three and share the other three between us six.  Our upbringing had taught us to help comrades in need.  We had been informed that our blankets had come from stores reserved for wartime.  Chairman Mao had ordered them to be taken out for the comfort of his Red Guards.  We expressed our heartfelt gratitude to Mao.  Now, when we ended up with hardly any blankets, we were told to be even more grateful to Mao, because he had given us all China had.

The blankets were small, and could not cover two people unless they slept close together.  The shapeless nightmares which had started after I had seen the attempted suicide had become worse after my father was taken away and my mother left for Peking; and since I slept badly, I often twisted out from under the blanket.  The room was poorly heated, and once I fell asleep, an icy chill invaded me.  By the time we left Peking the joints in my knees were so inflamed that I could hardly bend them.

My discomfort did not stop there.  Some children from the countryside had fleas and lice.  One day I came into our room and saw one of my friends crying.  She had just discovered a blot of tiny white eggs in the armpit seam of her underwear lice eggs.  This threw me into a panic, because lice caused unbearable itchiness and were associated with dirtiness.  From then on, I felt itchy all the time, and examined my underwear several times a day.  How I longed for Chairman Mao to see us soon so I could go home!

On the afternoon of 24 November, I was in one of our usual Mao quotation studying sessions in one of the boys' rooms (officers and boys would not come into the girls' rooms, out of modesty).  Our nice company commander came in with an unusually light gait and proposed conducting us in the most famous song of the Cultural Revolution: "When Sailing the Seas, We Need the Helmsman."

He had never done this before, and we were all pleasantly surprised. He waved his arms beating time, his eyes shining, his cheeks flushed. When he finished, and announced with restrained excitement that he had some good news, we knew immediately what it was.

"We're going to see Chairman Mao tomorrow!"  he exclaimed.  The rest of his words were drowned out by our cheers.  After the initial wordless yelling, our excitement took the form of shouting slogans: "Long live Chairman Mao!"

"We will follow Chairman Mao forever!"

The company commander told us that no one could leave the campus from that minute on, and that we should watch one another to make sure of this.  To be asked to watch one another was quite normal.  Besides, these were safety measures for Chairman Mao, which we were only too glad to apply.  After dinner, the officer approached my five companions and me, and said in a hushed and solemn voice: "Would you like to do something to ensure Chairman Mao's safety?"

"Of course!"  He signaled for us to keep quiet, and continued in a whisper: "Would you propose before we leave tomorrow morning that we all search each other to make sure that no one is carrying anything they shouldn't?  You know, young people might forget about the rules.... He had announced the rules earlier that we must not bring anything metal, not even keys, to the rally.

Most of us could not sleep, and excitedly talked the night away.  At four o'clock in the morning we got up and gathered in disciplined ranks for the hour-and-a-half walk to Tiananmen Square.  Before our 'company' set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search.  I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first.

A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him.  Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile.

The rest of us searched each other.  This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and play acting were taken for granted.

The early-morning streets were bursting with activity.

Red Guards were marching toward Tiananmen Square from all over the capital.  Deafening slogans surged like roaring waves.  As we chanted, we raised our hands and our Little Red Books formed a dramatic red line against the darkness.  We reached the square at dawn.  I was placed in the seventh row from the front on the wide northern pavement of the Avenue of Eternal Peace to the east side of Tiananmen Square.  Behind me were many more rows.

After lining us up tidily, our officers ordered us to sit down on the hard ground cross-legged.  With my inflamed joints, this was agony, and I soon got pins and needles in my bottom.  I was deadly cold and drowsy and exhausted because I could not fall asleep.  The officers conducted nonstop singing, making different groups challenge each other, to keep up our spirits.

Shortly before noon, hysterical waves of "Long live Chairman Mao!" roared from the east.  I had been flagging and was slow to realize that Mao was about to pass by in an open car.  Suddenly thunderous yelling exploded all around me.

"Long live Chairman Mao!  Long live Chairman Mao!"  People sitting in front of me shot up and hopped in delirious excitement, their raised hands frantically waving their Little Red Books.

"Sit down!  Sit down!"

I cried, in vain.  Our company commander had said that we all had to remain seated throughout.  But few seemed to be observing the rules, possessed by their urge to set eyes on Mao.

Having been sitting for so long, my legs had gone numb.

For some seconds, all I could see was a boiling sea of the backs of heads.  When I finally managed to totter to my feet, I caught only the very end of the motorcade.  Liu Shaoqi, the president, had his face turned in my direction.

Wall posters had already started attacking Liu as "China's Khrushchev' and the leading opponent of Mao.

Although he had not been officially denounced, it was clear that his downfall was imminent.  In press reports of the Red Guard rallies, he was always given a very undistinguished place.  In this procession, instead of standing next to Mao, as the number-two man should have done, he was right at the back, in one of the last cars.

Liu looked subdued and weary.  But I did not have any feelings for him. Although he was the president, he did not mean anything to my generation.  We had grown up imbued with the cult of Mao alone.  And if Liu was against Mao, it seemed to us natural that he should go.