A Heart for Freedom (7 page)

Trying to shake off these thoughts, I abruptly opened the door to my room. There, in the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun shining on the study table along the wall, I saw the two apples waiting for me.

5

Peking University

If there’s one place in China where a young person can be transformed by education, it’s Beida. It’s the country’s most competitive school, especially for applicants from a rural background, which is why it became a gathering place for the best and brightest students. Words cannot adequately describe how much Beida shaped me and how much I loved the time I spent there.

Founded in 1898 by an American missionary, Peking University sits at the northwest corner of the city on a campus studded with buildings modeled on traditional Chinese architectural designs. The lake, the bell tower at the top of a little hill, and the gardens that flower year-round give Beida a feeling of secluded peace and privilege. In such an idyllic setting, it was hard for any young student not to feel the zest of enthusiasm. The Triangle was the heart of campus, the place where, all day long, students’ paths crossed on the way to class, to the dining hall, or to exercise. And it was there at the Triangle we encountered a blizzard of postings for lectures by famous visitors, English contests, sporting events, weekend dances, musical performances, film showings, and flyers for the occasional demonstration or local election. The bewildering array of announcements gave a newcomer the sense of a campus bursting with fresh life. This intense atmosphere stimulated students’ ambitions.

In my newfound freedom, I still had not completely escaped my father’s sphere of control and protection. Somewhere in my subconscious lurked the fear that getting involved in politics would endanger my loved ones. Memories of my grandmother’s pale face reminded me from time to time of the risk of wandering into dangerous territory. During my four years at Beida, I managed to steer clear of anything that resembled political activity, such as local elections in our district or the occasional salon where discussions centered on Western influence or liberal bourgeois thought. For me, life at Beida went on with continued vitality and youthful spirit.

Mrs. Qian, my beloved physics teacher, had taught me about Madame Curie. After I read a biography of the great French scientist, my dream had been to become a physicist like her. But the one boy who had outscored me by a few points on the final exam also took the physics spot. Instead, I was assigned to the department of geology. My second choice at Beida was psychology.

Psychology was a forbidden subject for many years under the Chinese Communist system. During the Cultural Revolution, Beida had responded to Chairman Mao’s disdain for intellectuals and intellectual theories by eliminating the psychology department. Professors who had taught there were criticized, tormented, and eventually hounded out of the city to perform manual labor alongside peasants in remote rural areas. There, as Mao instructed, they could undergo reeducation and thought reform. In 1983, seven years after the Cultural Revolution officially ended, Beida’s department of psychology offered one small class, open to twenty students. Only two or three other universities in the entire country were allowed to hold classes in psychology. So I couldn’t take psychology courses during my freshman year, but I was able to attend lectures.

The lectures on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs opened up a whole new dimension to me. During my growing-up years, my parents had exemplified devotion and discipline. They subordinated their personal needs and sacrificed their lives for a cause larger than life: the nation and its people. They were my role models, together with a cultural icon named Lei Feng, whose sacrificial service to the army and China was highly praised throughout the country, and they had instilled in me a belief in these ideals. But I could never truly relate to them. At Beida, I discovered a theory that addressed human psychological needs. I began to understand that we have a need for physical safety and well-being, but also for love and belonging, esteem, and what Maslow called self-actualization, or realizing one’s full potential.

This was extraordinary. Never before had I questioned my fundamental beliefs. I’d grown up in a system that divided people into opposite categories: good or bad, red or black, hero or enemy. Things were either right or wrong; there was no middle ground. These new psychological theories fascinated me. As I began to question the assumptions that had formed who I was, I realized there might be more than just two sides to human behavior. I wanted to learn more by declaring a major in psychology.

In those days, students weren’t supposed to switch majors and transfer between departments. But I stuck to my guns and continued to take courses the psychology department offered while I fought to convince the university to let me transfer. By the beginning of my third year at Beida, I was allowed to switch my major from geology to psychology, but I had to work extra hard to make up all the credits I’d missed in the first two years.

* * *

Socially, Beida never failed to live up to its reputation. It didn’t take long for any young person to blossom within its protective walls. I, too, emerged from the shell I’d erected around myself in my last year of high school, when I had been a quiet and melancholy recluse, alone with my books. At Beida I became the real young woman I was created to be: radiant, active, curious, trusting, and full of zest.

I loved the way spring burst forth all of a sudden after the long, cold, gray winter months. The trees turned green. The flowers blossomed. The air was soft and fragrant. The night breeze felt like a soft caress on the cheek. After nightfall, students began to appear outside, returning to their dormitories beneath the starry sky along winding paths under the leafy trees. You’d see students walking in pairs, holding hands and confiding their secrets until the last bells rang and the girls had to run to get inside their dorms.

For my first two years at Beida, I lived in Building 35, a girl’s dorm. The girls on the ground floor of my building were foreign language students, and they attracted many good-looking foreign male students to our building. Our dorm was locked up at 10:00 p.m. and guarded by an old lady who kept the girls tucked away and the boys at bay. This only enhanced the romance of those spring nights because the brave, young suitors sat under the trees around our building, played their guitars, and serenaded the girls, who lay inside on their bunk beds drifting off to sleep on clouds of love. Youth is such sweet wine.

On campus, I had many interests and activities. I quickly made friends with my fellow students—including one of Beida’s child prodigies, a bright young girl from Hunan, Chairman Mao’s home province, who had come to Beida when she was fifteen. Like me, she was taking geology and was crazy about Madame Curie. We bonded instantly. She was a brilliant student of many talents who possessed a wide-ranging curiosity about music, poetry, and art. She added a new richness to my life.

The 1980s were vibrant, dynamic times at Beida. China was just beginning to shake off the debris of the Cultural Revolution, and the university brought a stream of celebrities and experts to lecture on campus. My young friend and I attended all kinds of lectures and seminars together. One time a well-known opera singer came to give a lecture on the opera
Carmen
, by composer Georges Bizet. The title character is a Spanish girl working in a cigarette factory who falls passionately in love—body and soul—with a young soldier. When she demands the same total commitment from her lover, there are tragic consequences. Carmen’s bold character made a powerful impression on me. She was liberated—a real contrast to us shy, reserved, and submissive Chinese women. Bizet’s flamboyant score, with echoes of flamenco and bullfights, was still rampaging through my head days later.

We also went to lectures on makeup, skin care, and the proper use of shampoo and hair conditioner, all of which were just beginning to appear on the Chinese scene. You might think a lecture on makeup is a laughable subject at the country’s most elite university, but it typified Beida’s role as a pioneer on the forefront of Chinese society. Just seven years removed from the end of the Cultural Revolution, we were still emerging from a dark age when the Chinese authorities had condemned anything remotely related to beautification. The Mao suit was our national uniform—the last word in fashion during the Cultural Revolution. Until I attended the makeup lecture at Beida, I had never used lipstick. When I was a girl, nobody had ever heard of shampoo or hair conditioner. Back then, only the most elite families had private bathrooms. My family bathed once a week in a communal bathhouse on the army base, and even that was a luxury. The peasants had no place to bathe.

Another experiment was also underway at Beida: entrepreneurship. One of my friends opened a café on the south side of campus—arguably the first coffeehouse in Beijing. Coffee was an exotic item at that time, and you could find it only in a few international hotels in the city. Somehow my enterprising friend managed to convince a shop attendant at the Friendship Hotel to sell him a can of powdered coffee. He invited me to help him, and we cleared out a small room and set up a café of sorts. The minute we opened, business boomed. The small place was packed with good-looking men and women. This was long before Starbucks came to China. I have no idea how my friend concocted the fancy drinks that lured so many students to our little café. But every so often as I was taking orders and serving drinks, I glanced back and saw him crouched on the floor behind me, furiously mixing his potions. For a serious nerd like me, this venture was exciting and fun.

At that time, many students were interested in studying abroad. However, learning English, preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and applying to foreign universities was daunting and expensive. A friend of mine took a shortcut by marrying an overseas Chinese man to go to America, even though she didn’t love him. That was inconceivable to me. Yes, I wanted to study overseas and advance my career, but I wouldn’t trade the hope of true love simply for the convenience of going to America. Though I was wide eyed about all the new things I was learning at Beida, I still had my head on my shoulders.

I joined Beida’s long-distance running team as a backup runner my first year and became a reporter on the school newspaper in my second year. I was always thrilled when my name appeared as a byline over a story. After that, I joined the student government as a volunteer in the academic division. When I was assigned to organize a workshop on campus, I worked on one called “Do You Want to Be a Journalist?” I was stunned when all the seats were taken and students lined up to get on the waiting list. Like a child just learning how to walk, I almost couldn’t believe what I had accomplished.

* * *

During the registration for my workshop, in the noisy and crowded student government office, I met a young man—his family name was Wang—whose quiet presence stood out amid the clamor. A chemistry student who also excelled in the martial arts, Wang was several years older, of average height and build, and possessed an unusual aura of peace and calm, which I found very soothing. He soon opened a world to me I had never known before: faith in God. This was another taboo in China, where all forms of spiritual belief were condemned as capitalism’s poison to the working-class soul.

Wang told me he had spent the previous summer traveling by bicycle along the Yellow River, the birthplace of our ancient civilization. He had wanted to see the lives and culture of the Chinese heartland with his own eyes. On his journey through six provinces, he came upon a mountain village so poor that no woman could marry into it. When the local girls reached the age of matrimony, they left the village to marry elsewhere. No one in the village knew how to read, and the villagers clothed themselves in rags. It shocked Wang to see such dire poverty.

When the people heard that a college student had wandered into their midst, a village elder gathered everyone, young and old, into a small, mud hut and invited Wang to join them. As everyone stood around a tiny oil lamp, the elder brought out a bundle wrapped in black cloth. Slowly, with trembling hands, he unfolded the cloth, one layer at a time, until it revealed an old Bible. The pages were wrinkled and yellow.

The old man told Wang that, many years before, an American missionary had left the Bible before he was driven out of China by Mao’s liberation. Because none of the remaining villagers knew how to read, when they gathered to secretly worship, they simply passed the Bible around, hand to hand, and each person was allowed to touch it once. In this way, they received the presence of God. Still, they longed to know what was in that Bible, and they prayed for someone who could read it to them. When Wang showed up, they were overjoyed and said their prayers had been answered. Wang had no idea what they were talking about, but he was happy to oblige their request.

With all eyes on him, he read the Word of God as the people listened intently. He said it was as if they had all fallen into a trance. No one moved or left. Wang, too, felt the special bond these people shared. Without feeling tired, he kept reading late into the night. Each time he paused, the peasants begged him for more. Before he knew it, the rooster was crowing, and the peasants went out to work in the fields. Wang took a nap. After sunset, the peasants returned, and Wang continued reading to them.

After several days, Wang had to resume his trip in order to be back at school on time. The entire village turned out to see him off. They presented him with a large sack of sweet potatoes and would not let him leave without it. It was the best they could offer him from their village. Although Wang had many more miles to cover before he returned to Beijing, and he gave up many things along the way to lighten his load, he carried the sack of sweet potatoes on the back of his bicycle all the way home.