Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (80 page)

Xiao-her had been reading Marxist classics with genuine interest they were the only books available, and he needed something to satisfy his intellectual thirst.  Because the Communist Party charter stated that studying Marxism-Leninism was the first qualification for being a Party member, he thought he could combine his interest with practical gain. But neither his bosses nor his comrades were impressed.  In fact, they felt shown up because, coming mostly from peasant backgrounds and being semi-literate, they could not understand Marx.  Xiao-her was criticized for being arrogant and cutting himself off from the masses.  If he wanted to join the Party, he would have to find another way.

The most important thing, he soon realized, was to please his immediate bosses.  The next was to please his comrades.  In addition to being popular and working hard at his job, he had to 'serve the people' in the most literal sense.

Unlike most armies, which assign unpleasant and menial tasks to the lower ranks, the Chinese army operated by waiting for people to volunteer for jobs like fetching water for morning ablutions and sweeping the grounds.  Reveille was at 6:30 a.m.; the 'honored task' of getting up before this fell to those who aspired to join the Party. And there were so many of them they fought each other for the brooms. In order to secure a broom, people got up earlier and earlier.  One morning Xiao-her heard someone sweeping the grounds just after 4 a.m.

There were other important chores, and the one which counted most was helping to produce food.  The basic food allowance was very small, even for officers.  There was meat only once a week.  So every company had to grow its own grain and vegetables and raise its own pigs.  At harvest time the company commissar would often deliver pep talks:

"Comrades, now is the time of testing by the Party!  We must finish the whole field by this evening!  Yes, the work needs ten times the manpower we have.  But every one of us revolutionary fighters can do the job of ten men!

Communist Party members must take a leading role.  For those who want to join the Party, this is the best time to prove yourselves!  Those who have passed the test will be able to join the Party on the battlefield at the end of the day!"

Party members did have to work hard to fulfill their 'leading role," but it was the aspiring applicants who really had to exert themselves. On one occasion, Xiao-her became so exhausted that he collapsed in the middle of a field.  While the new members who had earned 'battlefield enrollment' raised their right fists and gave the standard pledge 'to fight all my life for the glorious Communist cause," Xiao-her was taken to a hospital, where he had to stay for days.

The most direct path to the Party was raising pigs. The company had several dozen of these and they occupied an unequaled place in the hearts of the soldiers; officers and men alike would hang around the pigsty, observing, commenting, and willing the animals to grow.  If the pigs were doing well, the swine herds were the darlings of the company, and there were many contestants for this profession.

Xiao-her became a full-time swineherd.  It was hard, filthy work, not to mention the psychological pressure.

Every night he and his colleagues took turns to get up in the small hours to give the pigs an extra feed.  When a sow produced piglets they kept watch night after night in case she crushed them.  Precious soybeans were carefully picked, washed, ground, strained, made into 'soybean milk," and lovingly fed to the mother to stimulate her milk.

Life in the air force was very unlike what Xiao-her had imagined. Producing food took up more than a third of the entire time he was in the military.  At the end of a year's arduous pig raising, Xiao-her was accepted into the Party.

Like many others, he put his feet up and began to take it easy.

After membership in the Party, everyone's ambition was to become an officer; whatever advantage the former brought, the latter doubled it. Getting to be an officer depended on being picked by one's superiors, so the key was never to displease them.  One day Xiao-her was summoned to see one of the college's political commissars.

Xiao-her was on tenterhooks, not knowing whether he was in for some unexpected good fortune or total disaster.  The commissar, a plump man in his fifties with puffy eyes and a loud, commanding voice, looked exceedingly benign as he lit up a cigarette and asked Xiao-her about his family background, age, and state of health.  He also asked whether he had a fiance to which Xiao-her replied that he did not.  It struck Xiao-her as a good sign that the man was being so personal.  The commissar went on to praise him: "You have studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously.  You have worked hard.  The masses have a good impression of you.  Of course, you must keep on being modest; modesty makes you progress," and so on.  By the time the commissar stubbed out his cigarette, Xiao-her thought his promotion was in his pocket.

The commissar lit a second cigarette and began to tell a story about a fire in a cotton mill, and about a woman spinner who had been severely burned dashing back in to rescue 'state property."  In fact, all her limbs had had to be amputated, so that there was only a head and a torso left, although, the commissar stressed, her face had not been destroyed, or more important her ability to produce babies.  She was, said the commissar, a heroine, and was going to be publicized on a grand scale in the press.  The Party would like to grant all her wishes, and she had said that she wanted to marry an air force officer. Xiao-her was young, handsome, unattached, and could be made an officer at any time .... Xiao-her sympathized with the lady, but marrying her was another matter.  But how could he refuse the commissar?  He could not produce any convincing reasons.  Love?

Love was supposed to be bound up with 'class feelings," and who could deserve more class feelings than a Communist heroine?  Saying he did not know her would not get him off the hook either.  Many marriages in China had been the result of an arrangement by the Party.  As a Party member, particularly one hoping to become an officer, Xiao-her was supposed to say: "I resolutely obey the Party's decision!"  He bitterly regretted having said he had no fiance.  His mind was racing to think of a way to say no tactfully as the commissar went on about the advantages:

immediate promotion to officer, publicity as a hero, a fulltime nurse, and a large allowance for life.

The commissar lit yet another cigarette, and paused.

Xiao-her weighed his words.  Taking a calculated risk, he asked if this was already an irreversible Party decision.  He knew the Party always preferred people to 'volunteer."  As he expected, the commissar said no: it was up to Xiao-her.

Xiao-her decided to bluff his way through: he 'confessed' that although he did not have a fiancte, his mother had arranged a girlfriend for him.  He knew this girlfriend had to be good enough to knock out the heroine, and this meant possessing two attributes: the right class background and good works in that order.  So she became the daughter of the commander of a big army region, and worked in an army hospital. They had just begun 'talking about love."

The commissar backed off, saying he had only wanted to see how Xiao-her felt, and had no intention of forcing a match on him.  Xiao-her was not punished, and not long afterward he became an officer and was put in charge of a ground radio communications unit.  A young man from a peasant background came forward to marry the disabled heroine.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working.  In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself."  In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops."  Acquiring foreign technology became 'sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet."  In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966.  Mme Mao claimed this was like 'the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century."  All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and generate chaos.  It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to 'shine."  In construction they had no place.

Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture.  In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni.  This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury.  The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.

He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.

Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius."  The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage.  Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone.  Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

It was in this period that I started to realize that it was Mao who was really responsible for the Cultural Revolution.  But I still did not condemn him explicitly, even in my own mind.  It was so difficult to destroy a god!  But, psychologically, I was ripe for his name to be spelled out for me.

Education became the front line of the sabotage by Mme Mao and her cabal, because it was not immediately vital to the economy and because every attempt at learning and teaching involved a reversal of the glorified ignorance of the Cultural Revolution.  When I entered the university, I found myself in a battlefield.

Sichuan University had been the headquarters of 26 August, the Rebel group that had been the task force of the Tings, and the buildings were pockmarked with scars from the seven years of the Cultural Revolution. Scarcely a window was intact.  The pond in the middle of the campus, once renowned for its elegant lotuses and goldfish, was now a stinking, mosquito-breeding swamp.  The French plane trees which lined the avenue leading from the main gate had been mutilated.

The moment I entered the university a political campaign started up against 'going through the back door."  Of course, there was no mention of the fact that it was the Cultural Revolution leaders themselves who had blocked the 'front door."  I could see that there were a lot of high officials' children among the new 'worker-peasant-soldier' students, and that virtually all the rest had connections the peasants with their production team leaders or commune secretaries, the workers with their factory bosses, if they were not petty officials themselves. The 'back door' was the only way in.  My fellow students demonstrated little vigor in this campaign.

Every afternoon, and some evenings, we had to 'study' turgid People's Daily articles denouncing one thing or another, and hold nonsensical 'discussions' at which everyone repeated the newspaper's overblown, vapid language.

We had to stay on the campus all the time, except Saturday evening and Sunday, and had to return by Sunday evening.

I shared a bedroom with five other girls.  There were two tiers of three bunk beds on opposite walls.  In between was a table and six chairs where we did our work.  There was scarcely room for our washbasins.  The window opened onto a stinking open sewer.

English was my subject, but there was almost no way to learn it.  There were no native English speakers around, indeed no foreigners at all. The whole of Sichuan was closed to foreigners.  Occasionally the odd one was let in, always a 'friend of China," but even to speak to them without authorization was a criminal offense.  We could be put into prison for listening to the BBC or the Voice of America.

No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain, and even this was locked up in a special room.  I remember the thrill of being given permission once, just once, to look at a copy.  My excitement wilted when my eyes fell on the front-page article echoing the campaign to criticize Confucius.  As I was sitting there nonplussed, a lecturer whom I liked walked past and said with a smile, "That paper is probably read only in China."

Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda.  The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!"  But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically.  In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal."  In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!"  was unreal!"  One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post.  These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history.  They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.