Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (81 page)

Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper.  This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them.  Although we were studying English, and were paid partly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert."  In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').

I had the misfortune to be better at English than my classmates, and was therefore resented by some of the “student officials," the lowest-level controllers, who supervised political indoctrination sessions and checked the 'thought conditions' of their fellow students. The student officials in my course had mostly come from the countryside.  They were keen to learn English, but most of them were semi-literate, and had little aptitude.  I sympathized with their anxiety and frustration, and understood their jealousy of me.  But Mao's concept of 'white and expert' made them feel virtuous about their inadequacies, and gave their envy political respectability, and them a malicious opportunity to vent their exasperation.

Every now and then a student official would require a 'heart-to-heart' with me.  The leader of the Party cell in my course was a former peasant named Ming who had joined the army and then become a production team leader.  He was a very poor student, and would give me long, righteous lectures about the latest developments in the Cultural Revolution, the 'glorious tasks of us worker peasant-soldier students," and the need for 'thought reform."  I needed these heart-to-hearts because of my 'shortcomings," but Ming would never come straight to the point.  He would let a criticism hang in midair "The masses have a complaint about you.  Do you know what it is?"  and watch the effect on me.  He would eventually disclose some allegation.  One day it was the inevitable charge that I was 'white and expert."  Another day I was 'bourgeois' because I failed to fight for the chance to clean the toilet, or to wash my comrades' clothes all obligatory good deeds.  And yet another time he would attribute a despicable motive: that I did not spend most of my time tutoring my classmates because I did not want them to catch up with me.

One criticism that Ming would put to me with trembling lips (he obviously felt strongly about it) was "The masses have reported that you are aloof.  You cut yourself off from the masses."  It was common in China for people to assert that you were looking down on them if you failed to hide your desire for some solitude.

One level up from the student officials were the political supervisors, who also knew little or no English.  They did not like me.  Nor I them. From time to time I had to report my thoughts to the one in charge of my year, and before every session I would wander around the campus for hours summoning up the courage to knock on his door.  Although he was not, I believed, an evil person, I feared him.  But most of all I dreaded the inevitable tedious, ambiguous diatribe.  Like many others, he loved playing cat and mouse to indulge his feeling of power.  I had to look humble and earnest, and promise things I did not mean and had no intention of doing.

I began to feel nostalgia for my years in the countryside and the factory, when I had been left relatively alone.  Universities were much more tightly controlled, being of particular interest to Mme Mao.  Now I was among people who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. Without it, many of them would never have been here.

Once some students in my year were given the project of compiling a dictionary of English abbreviations.  The department had decided that the existing one was 'reactionary' because, not surprisingly, it had far more 'capitalist' abbreviations than ones with an approved origin.

"Why should Roosevelt have an abbreviation FDR and not Chairman Mao?" some students asked indignantly.  With tremendous solemnity they searched for acceptable entries, but eventually had to give up their 'historic mission' as there simply were not enough of the right kinds.

I found this environment unbearable.  I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.

We often had to leave the university to do things that were irrelevant to our subjects.  Mao had said that we should 'learn things in factories, the countryside, and army units."  What exactly we were meant to learn was, typically, unspecified.  We started with 'learning in the countryside."

One week into the first term of my first year, in October 1973, the whole university was packed off to a place on the outskirts of Chengdu called Mount Dragon Spring, which had been the victim of a visit by one of China's vice-premiers, Chen Yonggui.  He was previously the leader of a farming brigade called Dazhai in the mountainous northern province of Shanxi, which had become Mao's model in agriculture, ostensibly because it relied more on the peasants' revolutionary zeal than on material incentives.

Mao did not notice, or did not care, that Dazhai's claims were largely fraudulent.  When Vice-Premier Chen visited Mount Dragon Spring he had remarked, "All, you have mountains here!  Imagine how many fields you could create!"  as if the fertile hills covered in orchards were like the barren mountains of his native village.  But his remarks had the force of law.  The crowds of university students dynamited the orchards that had provided Chengdu with apples, plums, peaches, and flowers.  We transported stones from afar with pull carts and shoulder poles, for the construction of terraced rice paddies.

It was compulsory to demonstrate zeal in this, as in all actions called for by Mao.  Many of my fellow students worked in a manner that screamed out for notice.  I was regarded as lacking in enthusiasm, par fly because I had difficulty hiding my aversion to this activity, and partly because I did not sweat easily, no matter how much energy I expended.  Those students whose sweat poured out in streams were invariably praised at the summing-up sessions every evening.

My university colleagues were certainly more eager than proficient. The sticks of dynamite they shoved into the ground usually failed to go off, which was just as well, as there were no safety precautions.  The stone walls we built around the terraced edges soon collapsed, and by the time we left, after two weeks, the mountain slope was a wasteland of blast holes, cement solidified into shapeless masses, and piles of stones.  Few seemed concerned about this.

The whole episode was ultimately a show, a piece of theater - a pointless means to a pointless end.

I loathed these expeditions and hated the fact that our labor, and our whole existence, was being used for a shoddy political game.  To my intense irritation, I was sent off to an army unit, again with the whole university, in late 1974.

The camp, a couple of hours' truck journey from Chengdu, was in a beautiful spot, surrounded by rice paddies, peach blossoms, and bamboo groves.  But our seventeen days there felt like a year.  I was perpetually breathless from the long runs every morning, bruised from falling and crawling under the imaginary gunfire of 'enemy' tanks, and exhausted from hours of aiming a rifle at a target or throwing wooden hand grenades.  I was expected to demonstrate my passion for, and my excellence at, all these activities, at which I was hopeless.  It was unforgivable for me to be good only at English, my subject.  These army tasks were political assignments, and I had to prove myself in them.

Ironically, in the army itself, good marksmanship and other military skills would lead to a soldier being condemned as 'white and expert."

I was one of the handful of students who threw the wooden hand grenades such a dangerously short distance that we were banned from the grand occasion of throwing the real thing.  As our pathetic group sat on the top of a hill listening to the distant explosions, one girl burst into sobs.  I felt deeply apprehensive too, at the thought of having given apparent proof of being 'white."

Our second test was shooting.  As we marched onto the firing range, I thought to myself: I cannot afford to fail this, I absolutely have to pass.  When my name was called and I lay on the ground, gazing at the target through the gunsight, I saw complete blackness.  No target, no ground, nothing.  I was trembling so much my whole body felt powerless. The order to fire sounded faint, as though it was floating from a great distance through clouds.  I pulled the trigger, but I did not hear any noise, or see anything.

When the results were checked, the instructors were puzzled: none of my ten bullets had even hit the board, let alone the target.

I could not believe it.  My eyesight was perfect.  I told the instructor the gun barrel must be bent.  He seemed to believe me: the result was too spectacularly bad to be entirely my fault.  I was given another gun, provoking complaints from others who had asked, unsuccessfully, for a second chance.  My second go was slightly better: two of the ten bullets hit the outer rings.  Even so, my name was still at the bottom of the whole university.  Seeing the results stuck on the wall like a propaganda poster, I knew that my 'whiteness' was further bleached.  I heard snide remarks from one student official: "Humph! Getting a second chance!  As if that would do her any good!  If she has no class feelings, or class hatred, a hundred goes won't save her!"

In my misery, I retreated into my own thoughts, and hardly noticed the soldiers, young peasants in their early twenties, who instructed us. Only one incident drew my attention to them.  One evening when some girls collected their clothes from the line on which they had hung them to dry, their knickers were unmistakably stained with semen.

In the university I found refuge in the homes of the professors and lecturers who had obtained their jobs before the Cultural Revolution, on academic merit.  Several of the professors had been to Britain or the United States before the Communists took power, and I felt I could relax and speak the same language with them.  Even so, they were cautious.  Most intellectuals were, as the result of years of repression.  We avoided dangerous topics.  Those who had been to the West rarely talked about their time there.

Although I was dying to ask, I checked myself, not wanting to place them in a difficult position.

Partly for the same reason, I never discussed my thoughts with my parents.  How could they have responded with dangerous truths or safe lies?  Besides, I did not want them to worry about my heretical ideas. I wanted them to be genuinely in the dark, so that if anything happened to me they could truthfully say they did not know.

The people to whom I did communicate my thoughts were friends of my own generation.  Actually, there was little else to do except talk, particularly with men friends.

To 'go out' with a man being seen alone together in public was tantamount to an engagement.  There was still virtually no entertainment to go to anyway.  Cinemas showed only the handful of works approved by Mine Mao.

Occasionally a rare foreign movie, perhaps from Albania, would be screened, but most of the tickets disappeared into the pockets of people with connections.  A ferocious crowd would swamp the box office and try to tear each other away from the window to get the remaining few tickets.  Scalpers made a killing.

So, we just sat at home and talked.  We sat very properly, as in Victorian England.  For women to have friendships with men was unusual in those days, and a girlfriend once said to me, "I've never known a girl who has so many men friends.  Girls normally have girlfriends."  She was right.  I knew many girls who married the first man who came near them.  From my own men friends, the only demonstrations of interest I got were some rather sentimental poems and restrained letters one of which, admittedly, was written in blood from the goalkeeper on the college football team.

My friends and I often talked about the West.  By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place.

Paradoxically, the first people to put this idea into my head were Mao and his regime.  For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of 'class hatred," respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence .... As I sometimes wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West.}

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications.  I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.  At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be.  I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views.  I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations.  Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed.  The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.