Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (65 page)

I was stunned.  First, what he said seemed to suggest that people thought officials' children had access to consumer goods, which was not the case.  Second, I was amazed at his obvious pleasure at being associated with us, and the prestige this clearly gave him in the eyes of his friends.  At the moment when my parents were in detention and we had just been thrown out of the compound, when the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee had been established and the capitalist-roaders had been ousted, when the Cultural Revolution seemed to have won, AI and his friends still apparently took it for granted that officials like my parents would come back.

I was to encounter a similar attitude again and again.

Whenever I went out of the imposing gate of our courtyard, I was always aware of the stares from people on Meteorite Street, stares which were a mixture of curiosity and awe.

It was clear to me that the general public regarded the Revolutionary Committees, rather than the capitalist roaders, as transient.

In the autumn of 1968 a new type of team came to take over my school; they were called "Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams."  Made up of soldiers or workers who had not been involved in factional fighting, their task was to restore order.  In my school, as in all others, the team recalled all the pupils who had been in the school when the Cultural Revolution started two years before, so they could be kept under control.  Those few who were out of the city were tracked down and summoned back by telegram.  Few dared to stay away.

Back at school, the teachers who had not fallen victim did no teaching. They did not dare.  The old textbooks had all been condemned as 'bourgeois poison," and nobody was brave enough to write new ones.  So we just sat in classes reciting Mao's articles and reading People's Daily editorials.

We sang songs of Mao's quotations, or gathered to dance 'loyalty dances," gyrating and waving our Little Red Books.

Making 'loyalty dances' compulsory was one of the major orders issued by the Revolutionary Committees throughout China.  This absurd twisting was mandatory everywhere: in schools and factories, on the streets, in shops, on railway platforms, even in hospitals for the patients who could still move.

On the whole, the propaganda team sent to my school was fairly benign. Others were not.  The one at Chengdu University was hand-picked by the Tings because the university had been the headquarters of their enemy Red Chengdu.  Yan and Yong suffered more than most.  The Tings instructed the propaganda team to put pressure on them to condemn my father.  They refused.  They later told my mother that they so admired my father's courage that they decided to take a stand.

By the end of 1968, all university students in China had been summarily 'graduated' en masse, without any exam, assigned jobs, and dispersed to every corner of the land.

Yan and Yong were warned that if they did not denounce my father, they would have no future.  But they stuck to their guns.  Yan was sent to a small coal mine in the mountains of east Sichuan.  This was just about the worst job possible; the work conditions were extremely primitive and there were virtually no safety measures.  Women, like men, had to crawl down the pit on all fours to drag the coal baskets out.  Yan's fate was partly the result of the twisted rhetoric of the time: Mme Mao had been insisting on women doing the same kind of work as men, and one of the slogans of the day was Mao's saying "Women can hold up half the sky."  But women knew that when they were given the privilege of this equality they were in for hard physical labor.

Immediately after the expulsion of university students, middle-school pupils like me discovered that we were to be exiled to faraway rural and mountainous areas to do back breaking farm labor.  Mao intended me to spend the rest of my life as a peasant.

22.  “Thought Reform through Labor”-To the Edge of the Himalayas (January -June 1969)

In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness.  We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside.

In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future."  They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution.

According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed."  Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two.  Of course, no one asked for clarification.  Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason.  In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment.  It was noticeable that none of Mao's

To the Edge of the Himalayas 505 henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it.

The first of us to be expelled was my father.  Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today.  It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no railway.  In ancient times, the area was used for dumping exiles, because its mountains and waters were said to be permeated with a mysterious 'evil air."  In today's terms, the 'evil air' was subtropical diseases.

A camp was set up there to accommodate the former staff of the provincial government.  There were thousands of such camps throughout China.  They were called 'cadres' schools," but apart from the fact that they were not schools, they were not just for officials either. Writers, scholars, scientists, teachers, doctors, and actors who had become 'useless' in Mao's know-nothing new order were also dispatched there.

Among officials, it was not only capitalist-roaders like my father and other class enemies who were packed off to the camps.  Most of their Rebel colleagues were also expelled, as the new Sichuan Revolutionary Committee could not accommodate anything like all of them, having filled its posts with Rebels from other backgrounds like workers and students, and with army men.

"Thought reform through labor' became a handy way of dealing with the surplus Rebels.  In my father's department only a few stayed in Chengdu.  Mrs.  Shau became deputy director of Public Affairs on the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee.

All Rebel organizations were now disbanded.

The 'cadres' schools' were not concentration camps or gulags, but they were isolated places of detention where the inmates had restricted freedom and had to do hard labor under strict supervision.  Because every cultivable area in China is densely populated, only in arid or mountainous areas was there space to contain the exiles from the cities.  The inmates were supposed to produce food and be self supporting.  Although they were still paid salaries, there was little for them to buy.  Life was very harsh.

In order to prepare for his trip, my father was released from his place of detention in Chengdu a few days before his departure.  The only thing he wanted to do was to see my mother.  She was still being detained, and he thought he might never see her again.  He wrote to the Revolutionary Committee, as humbly as he could, begging to be allowed to see her.  His request was turned down.

The cinema in which my mother was being kept was on what used to be the busiest shopping street in Chengdu.

Now the shops were half empty, but the black market for semiconductor parts which my brother Jin-ming frequented was nearby, and he sometimes saw my mother walking along the street in a line of detainees, carrying a bowl and a pair of chopsticks.  The canteen in the cinema did not operate every day, so the detainees had to go out for their meals from time to time.  Jin-ming's discovery meant we could sometimes see our mother by waiting on the street.  Occasionally she did not appear with the other detainees, and we would be consumed by anxiety.  We did not know that those were the times when her psychopath guard was punishing her by denying her permission to go and eat.  But perhaps the next day we would catch sight of her, one among a dozen or so silent and grim-looking men and women, their heads bowed, all wearing white armbands with four sinister black characters: 'ox devil, snake demon."

I took my father to the street for several days running, and we waited there from dawn fill lunchtime.  But there was no sign of her.  We would walk up and down, stamping our feet on the frost-covered pavement to keep warm.  One morning, we were again watching the thick fog lift to reveal the lifeless cement buildings, when my mother appeared.

Having seen her children many times on the street, she looked up quickly to see whether we were there this time Her eyes met my father's.  Their lips quivered, but no sounds came out.  They just locked eyes until the guard shouted at my mother to lower her head.  Long after she had turned the corner, my father stood gazing after her.

A couple of days later, my father was gone.  Despite his calm and reserve, I detected signs his nerves were on the verge of snapping.  I was desperately worried that he might go out of his mind again, particularly now that he had to suffer his physical and mental torment in solitude, without his family nearby.  I resolved to go and keep him company soon, but it was extremely difficult to find transport to Miyi, as public services to such remote areas were paralyzed.  So when I was told some days later that my school was being dispatched to a place called Ningnan, which was only about fifty miles from his camp, I was delighted.

In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan.  We were to live in villages among the peasants and be 'reeducated' by them.  What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed to reform to be more like them.  One of his sayings was: "Peasants have dirty hands and cow shit sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals."

My school and my sister's were full of children of capitalist-roaders, so they were sent to particularly godforsaken places.  None of the children of members of the Revolutionary Committees went.  They joined the armed services, which was the only, and much cushier, alternative to the countryside.  Starting at this time, one of the clearest signs of power was for one's children to be in the army.

Altogether, some fifteen million young people were sent to the country in what was one of the largest population movements in history.  It was an indication of the order within the chaos that this was swiftly and supremely well organized.  Everyone was given a subsidy to help buy extra clothes, quilts, sheets, suitcases, mosquito nets, and plastic sheets for wrapping up bed rolls.  Minute attention was paid to such details as providing us with sneakers, water cans, and torches.  Most of these things had to be manufactured specially, as they were not available in the poorly stocked shops.  Those from poor families could apply for extra financial help.  For the first year we were to be provided by the state with pocket money and food rations, including rice, cooking oil, and meat.  These were to be collected from the village to which we were assigned.

Since the Great Leap Forward, the countryside had been organized into communes, each of which grouped together a number of villages and could contain anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 households.  Under the commune came production brigades which, in turn, governed several production teams.  A production team was roughly equivalent to a village, and was the basic unit of rural life.  In my school, up to eight pupils were assigned to each production team, and we were allowed to choose with whom we wanted to form a group.  I chose my friends from Plumpie's form.  My sister chose to go with me instead of with her school: we were allowed to opt to go to a place with a relative.  My brother Jin-ming, though he was in the same school as I, stayed in Chengdu because he was not yet sixteen, which was the cut off age.  Plumpie did not go either, because she was an only child.

I looked forward to Ningnan.  I had had no real experience of physical hardship and little appreciated what it meant.  I imagined an idyllic environment where there was no politics.  An official had come from Ningnan to talk to us, and he had described the subtropical climate with its high blue sky, huge red hibiscus flowers, foot-long bananas, and the Golden Sand River the upper part of the Yangtze shining in the bright sun, rippled by gentle breezes.

I was living in a world of gray mist and black wall slogans, and sunshine and tropical vegetation were like a dream to me.  Listening to the official, I pictured myself in a mountain of blossoms with a golden fiver at my feet.  He mentioned the mysterious 'evil air' which I had read about in classical literature, but even that added a touch of ancient eroticism.  Danger existed for me only in political campaigns.

I was also eager to go because I thought it would be easy to visit my father.  But I failed to notice that between us lay pathless mountains 10,000 feet high.  I have never been much good at maps.

On 27 January 1969, my school set off for Ningnan.

Each pupil was allowed to take one suitcase and a bed roll.

We were loaded into trucks, about three dozen of us in each.  There were only a few seats; most of us sat on our bed rolls or on the floor. The column of trucks bumped up and down country roads for three days before we reached the border of Xichang.  We passed through the Chengdu Plain and the mountains along the eastern edge of the Himalayas, where the trucks had to put on chains.  I tried to sit near the back so I could watch the dramatic snow showers and hail which whitened the universe, and which almost instantly cleared into turquoise sky and dazzling sunshine.  This tempestuous beauty left me speechless.  In the distance to the west rose a peak almost 25,000 feet high, beyond which lay the ancient wilderness in which were born many of the world's flora.  I only realized when I came to the West that such everyday sights as rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, most roses, and many other flowers came from here.  It was still inhabited by pandas.