Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (10 page)

I sat up, pulled aside my mosquito net and rubbed my eyes in a daze.

“Wu Ningkun,” the leader said, “turn over all of your correspondence with foreign spies.”

“Revolutionary Comrade,” Papa responded calmly, “I have no such thing.”

“Don’t deny your anti-revolutionary actions,” the young man
yelled. “Sit down. Make a list of everyone in the enemy country you have corresponded with since you returned to China in 1951 from the imperial United States.”

Papa dutifully seated himself at his desk and began to write. The Red Guards spread out through our apartment and began their search, opening drawers, boxes and photo albums and unceremoniously dumping the contents onto the floor. They crawled under the beds and tapped up and down the walls, floors and ceilings, seeking secret compartments.

The leader and a female Red Guard were intrigued by Papa’s books, which were stacked on his desk and stored in boxes around it. They crouched on the floor beside the boxes and began paging through the books. When they finished each one, they threw it off to the side or put it in a box. Finally the leader pointed to the filled boxes and announced, “These are bourgeois propaganda. Burn them!” At his words, two Red Guards slid the boxes into the corridor.

Oh, please don’t burn Papa’s books! I cried out in my heart.

As if he heard my thought, the leader motioned for Mama, my brothers, grandmother and me to leave. “All of you get out,” he commanded. “Go into the corridor. Leave the door open so I can see you.”

We huddled around the boxes of books. I saw among them Papa’s treasures—Hugo, Zola, Du Fu, Li Bai, Lawrence, Stendhal, Dumas, Cao Xueqing, Balzac and Shakespeare. I wanted to cry. The fat volume of
Jean-Christophe
by Romain Rolland lay on top of one of the boxes, close to my feet. The novel had been translated from French by Papa’s dear friend Fu Lei, who, along with his wife, had recently been driven to suicide by Red Guard harassment. The book was autographed. Papa kept it on the corner of his desk. Many times when he was writing, I saw him pause and page through it, then read a passage to himself.

While the Red Guards were absorbed with ransacking our apartment, I slid closer to the box. I was trembling as I reached over and furtively snatched
Jean-Christophe
. I sneaked a quick glance inside the
apartment to make sure no one saw me, put the book under my shirt and leaned back against the wall.

A Red Guard wheeled Mama’s bicycle past us. “I need it to make revolution,” he snarled. Mama bit her lower lip and averted her eyes.

I watched two female Red Guards sitting on the floor of my bedroom, going through the clothing, bedding and toys. One picked up the small mirror I kept under the bed. She examined it, looked up to make sure the other girl was not watching and smiled at herself in the mirror. She turned her head from side to side, pursed her lips, frowned and combed through her hair with her fingers. When she was finished preening, she slipped the mirror into her uniform pocket and resumed searching.

The other Red Guard found the Chairman Mao badge the soldier had given me. She admired it briefly before dropping it into her pocket.

The Red Guards confiscated everything they deemed bourgeois, Four Olds or counterrevolutionary. Papa’s Smith-Corona typewriter, Kodak camera, RCA phonograph, neckties, pictures he’d brought from his years in the United States, and a hundred-watt lightbulb they said wasted electricity were relegated to piles of goods to be removed. When they departed, they had Papa carry several boxes of books outside for them.

The moment they were gone I hurried to the bathroom. I pulled out the book, which had stuck to my sweaty back. The sweat left a dark stain on the cover.

I heard shouts and chanting outside, and I peered through the bathroom window. The Red Guards and a crowd of their followers were gathered in a tight circle around a fire. Papa, standing near the middle of the circle, was feeding his books to the flames. Each time a volume ignited, the crowd cheered and chanted. I felt tears well up in my eyes. “Do not cry!” I said to myself.

When Papa returned, he sat at his desk, sad and silent. I approached timidly and stood beside him. “My books,” he moaned. “All gone.” He struggled not to break down in front of me.

I carefully laid the copy of
Jean-Christophe
on the desk. “I’m so sorry I made the cover wet, Papa,” I said.

I went downstairs and outside. Although they had burned most of Papa’s books, two boxes sat off to the side, undamaged. I carried them back to the apartment. We picked up all the things the Red Guards left strewn throughout the apartment and put them away. Mama discovered that among the bourgeois materials they’d confiscated was our grocery money, which she kept in an envelope in the desk drawer.

In the weeks following the search, Papa attended daily meetings with his fellow professors to study the works of Chairman Mao and confess personal crimes. When supervising Red Guards became bored, Papa and his colleagues were herded outside to do manual labor.

One task the Red Guards enjoyed assigning was gathering night soil from the public toilets and transporting it to garden plots for use as fertilizer. Each academic, regardless of age or gender, used a wooden dipper to scoop the excrement from the latrines and drop it in the buckets. Once the buckets were full, the academics strapped them to a shoulder pole and lugged them from one plot to another while Red Guards upbraided them. They demanded that the cow demons shout slogans of self-denunciation as they trudged around bent low by the weight of their loads.

If a professor stumbled or fell and spilled his buckets, several Red Guards swooped down on him and forced him to pick up what he could with his hands and put it back in the bucket. Such moments provided an interlude of hilarity for the Red Guards. They laughed uproariously and slapped their thighs in merriment while witnessing the utter degradation of their former instructors.

Classes remained suspended in the fall of 1966 and university students spent their time making revolution. Middle schools and primary schools resumed their regular schedule. My older brother and I returned to our school, and my little brother, Yicun, was sent to the child care center. But the Cultural Revolution increasingly affected our lives. Children from black families were singled out for even greater segregation, harassment and punishment. The teachers turned a blind eye to the activities of the red students or collaborated with them. The persecuted black students found safety and solace only in one another. Even three-year-old Yicun was a target for hate. He became quiet at home and was reluctant to go to the center. He clung to our mother and cried when she dropped him off.

One morning she returned to the center and peeked inside. She watched, sickened with dismay, as a teacher led Yicun to a potty chair in the corner of the room. He was ordered to take off his pants and stay there. After that, the teacher paid no attention to him, and none of the other children played with him. Our parents gave Yicun special attention at home to make up for his mistreatment at the center. But
there was no one in a position of authority to whom they could complain.

My parents didn’t know what happened to me at school, and I could only guess what my older brother experienced. He played chess against himself each afternoon and evening when he’d finished his homework. On weekends he’d sit quietly, hour after hour, moving methodically from one side of the table to the other, lost in his game.

I had a companion in misery—my best friend Xiaolan. At school we shared a common label: daughters of the damned. Her father was labeled a “historic anti-revolutionary” for having served in the Nationalist Army during the war against the Japanese. Xiaolan’s name meant “little magnolia,” and it fit her perfectly. She was moonfaced, with thick black hair that she wore in long braids. Her skin seemed to glow every time she smiled. She looked like those children who appeared in propaganda posters illustrating the glory of China.

When Xiaolan and I began third grade together that autumn, the hatred of other students for us—“little cow demons and snake spirits”—initially took the form of teasing. Students, older and younger, sneered and called us names. Sometimes one of them threw a rock at us when our backs were turned. When we looked to see who had done it, a group of students stared back at us and snickered and made defiant gestures.

The boys pulled our hair or tried to pull down our trousers and underwear. Quickly, they became bolder. I arrived at school one morning, opened my desk and found a large dead rat inside. I was horrified and jumped back. The students watched my reaction with glee. I picked up the rat by its long tail and walked out of the room and threw it into the school yard. In the next days other dead animals—sparrows, mice and toads—were left inside my desk.

When I pretended the pranks didn’t bother me, it infuriated them. They realized from watching Red Guards that escalation of harassment was warranted when someone refused to be cowed. The teachers and other students saw what was happening. The teachers looked the other
way. The red students were delighted. They called themselves Little Red Guards, and in their sentiments and lust for inflicting pain on others, they were like grown-ups. They turned when I entered the room, watched as I opened my desk, and giggled or guffawed when I stepped back after finding what was inside. They leered as I walked from the room, waiting for the pleasure of seeing me lose my composure. The other black children stared down at their desks, fearing they might be next. Xiaolan was subject to similar indignities. Like me, she struggled to remain strong.

One day I found a lump of human excrement wrapped in paper in my desk. I gagged. Students near me grabbed their noses and hooted and pointed and backed away. I put down my books, took the edges of the paper, walked out the door, and deposited the mess in the latrine. I paused for a moment to fight back tears. Xiaolan appeared. She hugged me and said, “Don’t cry. It will only make them happy.” I returned to my desk and dutifully joined in the recitation of the quotations of Chairman Mao.

The teacher recited a few words, and we shouted them back at her. We did this each day until we had committed hundreds of quotations to memory.

The teasing and attacks moved from the school to the street. The red children began waiting for me after class and followed me chanting
“little rightist” and “little stinking ninth.” There were nine categories of class enemies: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, spies, capitalist roaders and the ninth and worst category—intellectuals. Intellectuals were referred to by Mao as the “stinking ninth.”

I stared straight ahead and kept walking. My rigid indifference only emboldened my detractors. They walked closer, surrounding me, crowding me. Some spat on me.

As the Cultural Revolution became more violent among the adults, so did the attacks by children on children. On the way home each afternoon, I watched Red Guards leading lines of men and women like cattle—Red Guards berated them, beat them, knocked them to their knees and commanded them to recite quotations from Chairman Mao or make self-condemnations. Crowds of adults and children watched this wretched carnival of misery with what seemed to be gleeful contempt and enraptured detachment.

One afternoon I was followed by a group of students taunting me. A boy ran up to me and punched me hard in the back. It took my breath away.

“Stinking rightist! Stinking rightist!” a girl shouted as she ran circles around me.

A boy charged and struck me in the back of the head. “Stupid girl,” he yelled. “Stay away from our classroom.”

My ears were ringing. The street seemed to undulate under my feet. I looked at the boy and saw the hate and rapture in his face.

A girl grabbed my schoolbag and threw my notebook, books and papers onto the street. I picked up the bag and ran to gather the spilled contents. One paper floated out of my reach each time I stooped to pick it up.

“Just look at that dancing idiot,” a boy screamed and the others doubled over in laughter. Another girl, her face flushed with hate, hurried over, stepped on the paper and grabbed a fistful of my hair. I fell to the cement. I got to my feet and stuffed the soiled papers into my bag.
The girl and her friends gathered close around me, legs spread, hands on hips, jaws jutting out, defying me to break their circle. I stepped in one direction and a boy blocked my way. They began to chant, “Little black bitch, little black bitch, little black bitch.”

Something snapped. I lashed out with my bag, catching a boy in the face. I leaped forward and grabbed a girl by the hair, jerked her head down and pulled it from side to side as she howled. In a flash the others were on my back, pummeling me, pulling my hair, punching my arms. I held on to the girl’s hair like someone possessed.

I was unafraid. As the others beat and battered me, I swung my bag and punched wildly with my fist. I bared my teeth and snapped at them. Finally someone tripped me, and I stumbled and fell flat on my back. Stunned, I paused for my head to clear. They stood over me, uncertain what to do next. The girl screamed for them to kill me, but she had edged away several safe feet.

The biggest boy, panting, fists clenched at his sides, looked down at me and spat, “Stupid little rightist bitch!” He turned and wrapped his arm around his weeping companion. The group moved on, singing songs of Chairman Mao’s quotations.

My arms, legs and face were scraped and bruised. I was crying and trembling so I could hardly stand. I sat on the curb, gasping for air. I clasped my hands together tightly to steady them. What happened? I asked myself. Where had my strength, my courage, my incredible rage come from?