Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos (8 page)

Mass rallies were held every night. Students sang revolutionary songs and marched through campus pounding on drums and cymbals while chanting slogans. The incessant nocturnal cacophony kept us awake. The admiring and attentive students who once crowded Papa’s classes and called him “Mr. Chips” seemed transformed overnight into a crowing and hateful herd. The nearby thunder of their rallies sent chills of fear through me.

Before long, militant students became bolder and began seizing those they termed “class enemies,” dragging them to the university’s athletic grounds for public interrogation and punishment. They vowed to expose every enemy of the people.

They came for Papa on the night of June 6.

As their boisterous procession neared our building, the windows rattled with the resonance of their poisonous invective and bluster. Then, all of a sudden, the shouting and drumming ceased. A single voice barked out orders. The crowd exploded with a cry: “DOWN WITH WU NINGKUN. DOWN WITH THE U.S. SPY.”

The monster I’d imagined, the one Papa cried about night after night, was now downstairs screaming his name. The door to the building
crashed open, followed by a rumble of footsteps rushing up the stairs. I wanted to run and hide. Where? I wanted to fly away. How? There was pounding on our door. Several voices cried together, “Let us in or we’ll break your door down, you filthy American spy!”

Grandmother parted her mosquito net, slipped from her bed and hobbled through the dark to the door. The moment she unbolted the door, it was flung open as if by a blast of wind. Students scrambled through the door and ran down the hall. A student switched on the light in our room and screamed, “Where is the bastard Wu Ningkun?”

I recognized Chen Congde. He’d visited our apartment many times to speak with Papa and receive tutoring. Papa told us he was from a “good peasant” background but was slow, so he’d been assigned to Papa for special help. Our eyes met for a moment. He was a startling contrast to that of the deferential self-conscious student I’d known. “I am the head of the Cultural Revolution Committee,” he shrieked. “Where is that archcriminal Wu Ningkun hiding?”

From the next room came a cry: “We have him!”

Chen Congde rushed to the next room. Two students seized Papa by the arms and hair and shouted, “Come with us, you spy!”

Papa appeared at the door, held tightly by students. He was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He was barefoot.

My throat constricted, and I let out a long desperate cry: “
Papa!
” My brother clung to me tightly, crying. Grandmother stood pinned against the wall by an enraged student. All the color had drained from her face. Her lips moved but her words stuck in her throat.

“Don’t be afraid, Maomao,” Papa said, turning to me. “I will be back soon.”

He forced a brave smile just before a student grasped the back of his neck and gave him a violent push. Papa stumbled out of my sight. There was an eruption of shouting and cheering outside when those who’d invaded our apartment appeared with Papa. A dozen professors who had been seized earlier were held by the crowd. Papa joined the group and the mob departed, pounding their drums and cymbals and triumphantly bearing the professors as their prizes.

They proceeded to the university athletic grounds where nearly four thousand students had gathered for the spectacle. The professors were lined up on the basketball court and forced to their knees. They were spat upon, slapped, slugged, kicked and punched by their tormentors. Chen Congde frequently interrupted the rough treatment to proclaim his contempt for Papa. He finished each of his diatribes by slapping Papa hard across the face.

Papa and his colleagues were designated “cow demons” by their captors. Chen Congde proclaimed in a piercing voice that it was beyond question that the cow demons had conspired to overthrow the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. But their plans had been foiled when the students joined together and rose up to crush the counterrevolution.

The hysteria of the denunciations increased by the minute. Then, almost as quickly as it began, it ended. The students broke into the chant: “Long live the great leader Chairman Mao! Long, long live the great leader Chairman Mao!” Chen Congde led the cheer and pumped his fist in the air with each repetition. When he was finished, he smirked at the kneeling professors and then sauntered away.

The students dispersed and left the cow demons kneeling on the ground. One by one they stood, some with difficulty. Without a word to one another, they, too, trudged through the night back to their apartments.

————

I lay staring into the darkness, listening to the voices and drums in the distance. When they stopped, I could hear the beating of my heart. Mama came to my bedside, holding my little brother, to assure us that everything would be all right. A short time later, I heard shuffling outside and then through the mesh of my mosquito net saw Papa’s hunched shadow.

“What happened?” Mama asked.

“Nothing,” he said and gave a tired chuckle. “I have to show up for political study tomorrow morning at eight. But I’m not alone anymore. The entire department consists of criminals and suspects now. We are all equally cow demons.”

The next morning I watched Papa as he prepared to depart. The side of his face was swollen and bruised, and he had difficulty walking, as if his feet had been bound when he was young.

Forty faculty members were herded into a classroom to hear a Party official warn them of the grave nature of their crimes. The official waved his fist and proclaimed, “The student action last night was warranted. You brought this down on yourselves. Your plans to restore a bourgeois society have been revealed and smashed.”

His harangue was met by cowed silence. The accused were commanded to go home and compose confessions telling how the beatings by the students had touched them “to their very souls” and to reveal why they were deserving of the beatings. “The students rescued you from the commission of additional crimes. They deserve your praise. Bring your confessions tomorrow at eight a.m.”

Papa went empty-handed to the next session. The other professors had obediently composed long confessions. These were not collected. The Party official asked for a discussion of what had happened on the basketball court. One after another, professors agreed that what had happened was wonderful. “The students woke us up and reminded us of how heinous our crimes are,” said one elderly professor. The others—with the exception of Papa—chorused assent. Another volunteered, “We are all criminals. The students were correct to do what they did. In fact, they were far more lenient than they should have been, and I am grateful for that.”

Papa listened with increasing despondency.

“In fact,” the confessing professor gushed, “we deserve to be shot! Each and every one of us deserves to be shot!”

His words were followed by a cry of agreement from the others.
Some were clearly dismayed that they had not been the first to offer to be shot.

“We must make up for our crimes against the people,” a female professor interjected. “We must make up for our crimes and … and … make up for the fact that we have failed the students and … and we have failed the people.”

“Yes! Yes!” the others exclaimed.

The Party official commended their self-condemnation. “Very good. Excellent, in fact. Just excellent.”

The meeting was interrupted by an announcement over the public address system that university officials had been relieved of their duties and the administration of the school was to be taken over by a working committee of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Before dismissing the professors, the Party official directed, “You all did very well today. Now go home and write down your confessions.” He’d forgotten that he’d already given that assignment. The next day the professors gathered, but the Party official did not show up. Each professor, with the exception of Papa, carried his expanded confession and expressed eagerness to present it.

Mama’s work group also devoted itself to daily political study and confessions. Routine academic activities were suspended and forgotten. In the following days a large number of soldiers moved onto campus and assumed administration of the university. Soldiers also moved into posts throughout the city of Hefei and took charge of the government.

With the onset of summer vacation, however, nearly all the students departed from campus, and the flame of revolution in Hefei seemed to have been nearly extinguished.

Students crowded onto trains that summer, as transportation was free. They traveled around the country visiting historic revolutionary sites and seeing how students were making revolution in other parts of China. Some young red faculty members joined them. A mandatory destination was Beijing, where the Cultural Revolution was born and where Chairman Mao, the “reddest, reddest sun of our hearts,” presided. The students rallied there by the hundreds of thousands, read and composed posters, exchanged ideas and stoked their enthusiasm for revolution.

Papa was “recapped” as a rightist. He told Mama that all faculty members and administrators were suspect. Capped or uncapped, no one knew what fate awaited him. My parents spoke in lower tones, as if they feared being overheard by someone listening in the hallway or outside. Grandmother was tense and nervous. She jumped at the slightest noise. At night she sat on her bed and stared at the wall, lost in confusion and fear.

My older brother spent hours playing chess against himself. Sometimes I watched him and envied his ability to lose himself so completely
in the game. My younger brother constantly clung to our father or mother.

I feared our home might be invaded again. I had nightmares.

The soldiers on campus and in the city provided some sense of security. The PLA was the champion of the people. The sight of a soldier was always reassuring. They could be depended upon, I believed, to maintain order and prevent injustice. I was taught that soldiers were heroes. I envied children from red families who might someday become PLA soldiers.

During the third week of June I began to suffer from a severe toothache. I didn’t want to bother Mama or Papa with my problem. I examined my mouth in the mirror and found a blackened tooth at the back with the gum swollen around it. I tried to pull the tooth out with my fingers but it would not budge. I asked Xiaolan to help me, but she was unable to extract it. I decided to visit a dentist.

The next morning I set out for the city’s only dental hospital. It was several miles away, in the downtown area of Hefei. I had only enough money for a one-way bus ride. I decided to take the bus to the dental hospital to make sure I got in line early for treatment. I planned to walk home. After asking around, I located the large facility. I hurried inside, waited in line, paid my five-fen fee, and after an hour was summoned to a cavernous room with many dental chairs, nurses and dentists. I’d dressed nicely that morning in my red-and-black-checked blouse and black trousers. I wanted to look like a responsible girl.

“Why are you here?” the nurse asked.

“My tooth hurts,” I said, opening my mouth and pointing inside. She said a dentist would take care of it.

I was surrounded by patients being tended by dentists. Some of them were moaning as the dentists worked on them. I began to feel anxious. A dentist came to my chair. He examined the tooth. “It’s rotting away,” he concluded. “I should remove it.”

“That’s okay,” I assured him.

He cautioned, “This will hurt. You can come back another time with your mother.”

“I’d like it fixed now,” I insisted.

“You’re a brave girl,” he said with surprise. He told the nurse to give me a shot of Novocain, and he waited for it to take effect. Neither the dentist nor the nurse was skilled. Several times they tried and failed to pull out the tooth. The dentist moved from one side of the chair to the other and traded places with the nurse. He tried to get the tooth from the new angle and, after another failure, finally succeeded. I didn’t make a sound. The dentist held up the extracted tooth for me to see.

“Keep the area around the tooth clean,” he instructed me. The nurse told me to rinse my mouth over a basin and put a cotton ball in the hole to stop the bleeding. Before I left, she gave me a small bag of clean cotton balls to use later. I was dizzy. I sat down outside the clinic for several minutes before I began my long walk home. I often felt inside my mouth to see if the cotton was saturated. Whenever it was I replaced it.

The day had become hot and humid, and heavy dark clouds hung in the summer sky. I was surprised by the ominous rumble of thunder and glanced up to see a single iridescent strand of lightning silver the air. I hurried, hoping to get home before the storm broke. I was caught in a heavy downpour. People darted past me, covering their heads with folded newspapers. My sandals sloshed and splashed as I walked along the flooded sidewalk.

I remembered a shortcut on a path through a wooded area. I decided to take it. I turned on to one of the dirt paths leading through the area, staying close to the edge so the tall pines shielded me from the rain. As I neared the university I started singing a popular tune praising the PLA.

As I hurried along, jumping over puddles, I was startled by a man—a PLA soldier—who appeared suddenly out of nowhere. One moment I was walking alone, and the next he was beside me. He was tall and somber. He held out an umbrella to shield me from the rain. I was surprised but not afraid because he was a soldier and he served the people.

“I heard you singing,” he said. “Where did you learn that song, little friend?”

“In school,” I replied, looking up at him and brushing rain-drenched hair out of my eyes.

“That’s good,” he said and patted me on the head. “Where are you going?”

“I am on my way home, Uncle PLA.”