Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (15 page)

The men, all former workers at Number One, stood on a platform, bent at the waist, heads bowed. The first, in handcuffs, was about my age. He was accused of raping a co-worker in the factory daycare center. He had also stolen her watch, one of the most valuable possessions a Chinese at the time could own. Those around me thought he would be executed.

The second man, who was not in handcuffs, was twenty-eight. He had bought and sold unused ration coupons. Today, he would have been praised as an imaginative entrepreneur, but in 1973, he was an enemy of the people. As a co-worker screamed anti-capitalist slogans into the microphone, he looked suitably chastened. I whispered my second cynical question to Teacher Dai: “Does this mean some people don’t have enough to eat?” She shook her head at me, and turned back to the proceedings. I felt embarrassed that I had asked.

The last worker was also in handcuffs. He had murdered his one-year-old child. According to the accusation, he was estranged from his peasant wife and didn’t want to pay child support. I was horrified. I didn’t even think there was pickpocketing in China, let alone infanticide. Nor did I realize how Maoist China locked people into marriage and jobs as surely as if they had been chained. Stringent rules kept workers in the cities and peasants on the land. Workers who married peasants were often doomed to live apart their whole lives.

Divorce was for the party elite, not hoi polloi. Mao divorced his second wife; Deng’s second wife divorced
him
. But the masses were supposed to use Mao Zedong Thought to work out their problems. That sounded good in theory. In practice, couples were subjected to humiliating pop psychology sessions with nosy co-workers and neighbors. Even in the most egregious cases in the 1970s, divorce was rarely granted. A friend of mine whose husband was a convicted bigamist petitioned authorities for more than a decade before they granted her a divorce.

The foot-dragging was partly due to a desperate housing shortage. If authorities permitted a divorce, as the sole supplier of housing they would also have to cough up an extra apartment. As a
result, estranged couples occasionally brought their new love interest home. A famous pop singer, Li Guyi, told me she shared a single room with her ex-husband, from whom she had been “separated” for three years. “I’ve had to draw a chalk line down the middle of our room. That side is his. This side is mine,” she said.

On that blustery afternoon, it didn’t bother me that rapists and murderers were punished, or even executed. Hadn’t Mao said, “A revolution is not a dinner party”? I still believed in absolutism. If you were wrong, well, then off with your head. I hadn’t yet begun to question the Chinese justice system, or lack thereof. Although I was surprised that trading ration coupons was a serious crime, I still yearned to be a true believer. That night, I tried to rationalize it in my diary, jotting down some nonsensical musings about how trading in coupons might upset China’s carefully planned economic system.

That April afternoon, I was surprised again at how listless that crowd was. “Long live Chairman Mao!” the emcee at the microphone screamed. People mumbled the slogan under their breaths. But when he announced, “Meeting dismissed!” everyone came back to life. They rushed off to buy cabbage or chatted with their friends. Nobody seemed interested in talking about what they had just seen.

On April 10, 1973, Erica and I were recalled to Beijing University to hear an important Central Committee document. In the Big Canteen, a party official solemnly read aloud the announcement that Comrade Deng Xiaoping had been restored to all his posts. I was stunned. For as long as I could remember, Deng was the enemy. His most infamous quotation was the epitome of opportunism: “Black cat. White cat. As long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” In other words, who cared if stock markets were capitalist? Communists could make use of them, too.

The son of a Sichuan landowner, Deng Xiaoping left home at fourteen and never returned. In France two years later, he worked in a Renault auto plant, acquired a taste for coffee and baguettes, and joined the Chinese Communist Party. He went on to the Soviet Union for a year of Marxist studies, then returned to China,
where he joined the Communist guerrillas. His first wife died in childbirth. His second wife dumped him during a 1930s purge and later died in the Soviet Union. In Yanan, like many Party leaders, he acquired a new wife, Zhuo Lin.

After the Communist victory, Deng rose swiftly, first running Sichuan province and eventually becoming a vice-premier. In the early 1960s, the diminutive leader – he was less than five feet tall — began implementing some capitalist-style reforms to help pull China out of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Deng confessed before a frenzied mob of Red Guards that he had deviated from Mao’s revolutionary line. He and Zhuo Lin were exiled to Jiangxi province in the south. For the next seven years, he operated a lathe while she cleaned rust off scrap metal. In 1971, their paralyzed eldest son joined them. Deng gave him daily sponge baths and begged Mao for medical treatment. The Great Helmsman ignored his pleas. But in 1973, when Mao needed to jumpstart China’s ailing economy, he restored Deng to his old post as vice-premier, and Deng had to say publicly how grateful he was.

I didn’t understand that his surprise rehabilitation signaled the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution. All the document said was, “His crimes were serious, but of a different nature from Liu Shaoqi’s” (the now-dead former president). “Historically he has always adhered to a correct line.” The
People’s Daily
printed Deng’s name and photo without explanation, as if the past seven years of being a non-person had never happened.

On our fiftieth and last day, the factory Communist Party secretary received us. Every Chinese workplace, school and government office had one, and the more important the organization, the more powerful its Party secretary. Like my bossy classmate, Luo Ning, Ye Xuanping was the child of one of China’s ten marshals. He bore a striking resemblance to his powerful father, Ye Jianying, who was destined to change the course of Chinese history by arresting Madame Mao. Despite his simple cotton clothes, Party Secretary Ye’s pedigree as a Red princeling gave him an unmistakable air of authority. An able administrator and an agile politico, he would later
become a Central Committee member and governor of his native Guangdong, China’s richest province. By the early 1990s, he would amass a personal fortune said to be in the millions of dollars. And when Beijing would try to clip his wings by “promoting” him to vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a largely ceremonial post that required him to reside in the capital, he would resist for more than a year, refusing to vacate the governor’s mansion.

In his presence, Teacher Dai was breathless. Fu the Enforcer kept giggling and saying the wrong thing. The rest of the workers present kept a respectful silence. We sat in a vast meeting room filled with rows of sofas covered with snowy antimacassars. As a young woman poured steaming tea into mugs, Party Secretary Ye, who was then forty-nine years old, said he would not make a speech.

“I’m more interested in what you have to say,” he said. “You come from Canada and the U.S. You have known capitalism. Now you are seeing socialism. You must use a comparative perspective to view our factory. What are your impressions of China? How would you compare socialism to capitalism?”

All eyes turned toward Erica and me. I spoke up. “The Chinese proletariat has great class feeling,” I began. “One day, during a sudden downpour, the incoming shift gave their raincoats and umbrellas to the departing shift. Then the next incoming shift gave
their
raingear to that shift. I doubt,” I concluded, “that would have happened in a dog-eat-dog capitalist society.” Party Secretary Ye seemed pleased. Fu the Enforcer beamed.

Encouraged, I embroidered my theme. “Workers at home are badly exploited. Workers in China are working for themselves, and for socialism. I only hope I can rid myself of my bourgeois leanings, and one day join the true proletariat.”

In June 1973, Erica and I excitedly joined our classmates for the wheat harvest. We arose at 4:30 a.m., splashed water on our faces and stumbled over to the Big Canteen, where we bought double rations of tasteless steamed bread and extremely salty pickles. After lining up in military formation for a roll call, we climbed into the back of damp army trucks for the bumpy ride to the commune. My classmates cut the wheat with small sickles. Since I was left-handed,
my job was to bundle it, making “rope” by twisting shanks of freshly cut wheat.

Stupidly, I had forgotten my straw hat. By eight the sun had vaporized the clouds. Because of a storm the previous day, the ground was literally steaming. When I finally stopped to straighten my back, the wheatfields shimmered like a sea of molten gold and the sky was so brilliant my eyes hurt. I thought I was about to pass out when the class leader called a break. I checked my watch and was depressed to see it was only nine-thirty. At noon, I collapsed on a straw mat and dreamed of iced coffee. My hands were lacerated from the straw, my back hurt, and my throat and tongue were thick with thirst. I couldn’t eat the steamed bread and salted pickles. Scarlet was ravenous, and ate her lunch and mine. We finally quit at five in the afternoon, after half a dozen classmates had fainted from heat exhaustion.

In July I prepared to leave China. For more than a year, I had been subjected to a relentless barrage of propaganda and had absorbed many of the values. Maoism suited the absoluteness of youth. I was so self-absorbed. I knew so little about human suffering. And I was always being judged myself. I wanted to prove that despite my “bad” background, I could be as “good” as the next person.

I also had studied Mao’s famous essay
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
, in which he promised that only the worst class enemies would be treated harshly. Ordinary people who made mistakes would be encouraged to reform and clasped to the bosom of the motherland. Only class enemies would be sent off to the gulag. I did not know that the reason I enjoyed biking down the empty streets of Beijing was because so many of its seven million residents had been sent down to farms and communes for thought reform.

During one school break, I visited the aunt who had been so frightened of losing touch with her brother in Canada that she secretly jotted his address down in a textbook. Aunt Yuying was a chemistry professor in Tianjin, a two-hour train ride from Beijing. She welcomed me to stay in her campus apartment even though it meant hassling with the university bureaucracy. Every morning, she
made me omelettes for breakfast, an unheard-of luxury that also used up her monthly ration of eggs. For lunch, she made spring rolls, which wiped out her meager cache of cooking oil. When I left, she gave me her vast collection of Mao buttons, including a hand-painted porcelain one and another made from the tip of a toothbrush.

But Aunt Yuying never talked frankly to me. More than twenty years later, when I was forty and she was seventy, I asked why she had never hinted at the problems in China back then. “You were so radical,” she said gently. “You believed everything. We didn’t dare tell you. It was too dangerous.”

I am not blaming anyone but myself for what I did next. Just a few weeks before I was scheduled to leave Beijing University, a student I knew only slightly approached Erica and me. Yin Luoyi was in the year ahead of us, in the very first history class of worker-peasant-soldier students. She was pretty, with large, expressive eyes. “Let’s go for a walk around No Name Lake,” Yin suggested. Since most people avoided us, Erica and I were pleased, and readily agreed. Yin seemed nervous. As we strolled around the lake, she peppered us with questions about the West.

“Do you have refrigerators?” she asked. “What kind of class background do you need to attend university?” Erica and I were annoyed. Why was she so fixated on the West? Didn’t she understand it was capitalist? She did. Yin paused, and took a deep breath.

“I want to go to the United States,” she said. “Can you help me?”

We decided Yin did need help. The Communist Party would save her from herself. After my experience with Chen the auto mechanic, I knew what would happen. Nothing permanently unpleasant. She would be reprimanded, and that would be the end of it. And this way she would be rescued from the dangers of the U.S.A. After all, Mao had said: “Persuasion, not compulsion, is the only way to convince people. To try to convince them by force simply won’t work. This kind of method is permissible in dealing with the enemy, but absolutely impermissible in dealing with comrades or friends.”

Although Erica and I still had misgivings about the ethics of snitching on people, we suppressed them. We were just twenty years old, with a quite undeveloped moral sense. Like millions of Red
Guards our age, we were trying to do the right thing for the revolution. And we knew that Mao frowned on soft-hearted liberals. “Our aim in exposing errors and criticizing shortcomings, like that of a doctor curing a sickness, is solely to save the patient and not to doctor him to death … In treating an ideological or a political malady, one must never be rough and rash but must adopt the approach of ‘curing the sickness to save the patient,’ which is the only correct and effective method.”

After talking it over, we reported Yin to the Foreign Students Office. “I remember ratting. I really hate myself for that,” said Erica, when I asked her two decades later what she recalled. “We actually thought we were doing the right thing. It was for her sake. We weren’t trying to get points for ourselves.”

Unlike Aunt Yuying, who knew me better, Yin Luoyi never dreamed Erica and I were True Believers. Two decades later, I mentioned the incident to my classmate Forest, the one who had briefly roomed with Erica. “We all would have done the same,” she said. “That’s what was wrong with the Cultural Revolution. It didn’t just ruin the economy and industry or keep us behind in scientific research. Look what it did to personal relationships. We were all reporting on each other and meddling in each other’s affairs under the guise of being revolutionary and patriotic.” She reminded me that I had been completely naive back in 1973. When I grimaced, Forest confessed that in 1966, when she was fourteen, she had denounced her own father, then the deputy minister of propaganda. “The Communist Party taught us, ‘Love your dad and love your mom, but not as much as Chairman Mao.’ ”