Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (20 page)

If harvesting wheat was backbreaking, growing rice was ludicrous. I was sure we were expending more calories planting it than we could ever hope to recoup. I wondered why Chinese civilization hadn’t died out long ago. After three hours’ sleep, we got up at midnight to spread chemical fertilizer by hand over every inch of our land. The next day, we had to transform the flat wheat fields into paddy fields, which meant building an earthen ridge around each patch of land until it looked like a square wading pool. I carried basket after basket of earth suspended from a gently bobbing shoulder pole. Although it looked so graceful in the propaganda movies, it nearly killed me in real life. I tried padding myself with a small towel, but it still felt like someone had plunged a knife into my shoulder. Finally I used a tiny pillow. I looked like a wimp, but at least I managed to keep working.

Using hoes and shovels, we leveled the paddy fields, then flooded them from our irrigation ditch. Standing ankle deep in mud, water and leeches, we began transplanting. Just as a cook knows instinctively how much rosemary to put in a dish, I learned to grab the proper-sized clump of rice seedlings. With a sharp twist of the wrist and a downward thrust of three fingers, I shoved the seedlings into the ground, like an oven thermometer into a raw roast. Like cooking, transplanting rice was an art. Too low and the seedlings would drown; too high and they would list; too close together and they wouldn’t thrive; too far apart and precious land would be wasted. We worked ferociously, bent at the waist in the blazing sun, yet it still took eight days for my forty classmates to plant seven acres.

I had already stopped menstruating for several months by the time we started the Three Struggles of the Summer. Now, I was bone-tired. Each time I shoved a clump of seedlings into the ground, the sandy soil tore my cuticles. The strain of bunking with nine others, the disruption of sleep cycles caused by work shifts that started at 4 a.m., midnight or 6 a.m., and a constant fear of failing at physical labor converged to give me insomnia. In desperation, I started popping sleeping
pills prescribed by Big Joy’s resident “barefoot doctor,” a paramedic with a couple of months’ training. Even Fragrance, my take-no-prisoners roommate, was in bad shape. The doctor diagnosed her swollen right hand as an inflammation of the wrist and warned she would not recover unless she had a complete rest.

We finally finished the Three Struggles of the Summer after ten days of round-the-clock toil. As a reward, Big Joy officials gave us three days off I was sleeping soundly on the first day when the reveille shrieked at 6:30 a.m. We arose in confusion, splashed water on our faces and stood at attention in squad formation. A teacher broke the news to us as gently as she could. “We must work another day,” she said, and our faces fell. “The department of Oriental languages hasn’t finished transplanting their rice. It isn’t right for one department to take its holidays earlier than the others simply because it has finished. We have a collective responsibility to the whole farm.”

I fought back tears of self-pity. Our summer vacation had already been canceled. We had three lousy days off, and now we’d be lucky to get one. It wasn’t fair. I had already passed their stupid test. Now I had folded up my revolutionary ardor and packed it away. I couldn’t face another day in the fields. A flood of reactionary thoughts filled my mind. What was I doing working like a coolie? Hadn’t my grandparents emigrated to Canada precisely to avoid this?

Some of my homesick classmates were already heading for the long-distance bus back to Beijing when our teachers stopped them. None, of course, uttered a word of complaint, and neither did I. The department of Oriental languages gave us their easiest chores — uprooting seedlings from nursery beds. I cheered up slightly when I got to work next to Horsepower all morning. But my muscles were screaming and my blistered hands — not to mention my ideology — were a mess. At noon, I pushed myself to volunteer for a team repairing some of the earthworks around the paddy fields. I worked in a stupor. Twice, I stumbled and fell. When people spoke to me, I couldn’t understand them. Everything they said had to be repeated twice.

By midafternoon, I was hot and irritable. I verged on hysteria when a blood-sucking leech stuck on my leg in the paddy fields.
(Never pull them, slap them hard and hope they fall off, I was advised.) But when even the ladybugs began to bite me through my shirt, I felt I was going to burst into tears. My PLA squad leader sensed this and suggested we both take a break. I had never stopped working before while others were still at it. This time I didn’t hesitate. I meekly followed him back to our dormitories, where I started crying from a mixture of shame and fatigue. After trying so hard, I had failed. I was too weak to be a True Communist. He didn’t understand. “Did someone criticize you?” he asked. That only made the tears fall harder. “Did you get a letter from home that upset you?” I shook my head. He gave up and left me alone.

The history department was downright cushy compared to the philosophy department, which taught only hard-line Marxism. Like philosophers everywhere, they elevated the most mundane events to cosmic levels. Hauling pig manure wasn’t just a smelly job but a test of one’s moral fiber. During the overnight march to Big Joy, their female students had carried backpacks to out-macho women in other departments. And to show it was the most advanced ideologically, the philosophy department spent more time than anyone else in manual labor. By June, they were two months behind their class schedule and were forced to cancel an entire course in Communist Party history.

But the philosophy department’s most idiotic ruling was a ban on candy. I knew that my caramels were all that stood between me and a nervous breakdown. After several months of hard labor and candy deprivation, one-third of the philosophy department students at Big Joy were diagnosed with
shengjing shuai mo
, a common ailment during the Cultural Revolution that is best translated as “depression and nervous debility.”

My favorite classmate was a Maoist with a sense of humor. Gu Weiming (Future Gu) was the only one I knew who recited slogans like one-liners. A slim guy with a brush cut and thick black-rimmed glasses, he was a health nut who swam every day after lunch. I admired Future because he was so selfless. When there wasn’t enough to eat, he shared his meager rations with others. When we needed someone to monitor irrigation levels overnight, he volunteered, then stuck to the same grueling daytime schedule as we did.

Like all my classmates, Future had been a Red Guard. In 1966, he formed a faction of two at his high school in Beijing and mimeographed his own newspaper. “Exams are a reactionary, bourgeois tool,” he thundered in his maiden editorial. His instincts were purely pragmatic. “I had failed math and I was afraid to show my marks to my father,” he explained to me. “I was so relieved when the Cultural Revolution began. I just threw the exam results down the toilet and wrote the editorial.”

That summer, Future, then fifteen, led his classmates in vigilante-style patrols. They slashed tight pants and changed the traditional names of stores and roads. The Soviet mission’s street became Oppose Revisionism Road, forcing the embassy to do a self-criticism every time it wrote its return address. The following year, Future joined the exodus of teenaged Red Guards to the countryside. In 1973, after several years of herding sheep in Inner Mongolia, he passed the entrance exams to Beijing University, but was forced to defer a year to applicants with more exploited ancestors.

An avid philatelist, Future lusted after foreign stamps. At Big Joy one hot July afternoon, he showed me his precious collection, which included some of the first Communist Chinese stamps ever issued. My three foreign classmates and I quietly gave him stamps. One day, a letter arrived for me with an eye-catching stamp commemorating the Montreal Olympics. A peasant classmate asked for it. Without thinking, I said I had promised it to Future. Word spread and, within a day, the gung-ho roommate of my Romanian classmate reported the incident to Party Secretary Pan, who confronted Future. Pan demanded to see the stamp collection.

“What’s this?” Pan said, pointing to a generic Canadian stamp.

“The Queen of England.”

“It’s reactionary to put a queen on a stamp.”

Future thought,
Who else would Canadians put on their stamps? They can’t use Mao
. Party Secretary Pan flicked through the Soviet stamps with equal contempt.

“The worst thing is to have Chinese students fighting over foreign stamps,” he declared. “That is a great loss of face for the motherland.” He demanded to know if anyone else was collecting them. Future had in fact shared some of his foreign stamps with two other
classmates, but he wasn’t about to turn them in. He said he was the only one. Party Secretary Pan sighed and shook his head.

“What should be done?” he asked rhetorically, expecting Future to grovel for mercy. My classmate knew he had no defense, so he decided to be bold. The old Red Guard spirit rose in him.

“Burn my stamps, confiscate them or send me back to the countryside,” he said, looking steadily at Pan. “I can become a peasant again. I’m not afraid.” That took the Party secretary by surprise. He left, leaving the stamp collection with Future. Pan later warned me to stop passing on my “imperialist” stamps.

During ditch digging the next day, the Romanian’s roommate came over to us. Tang Mingzhu (Bright Pearl Tang) tried to explain that she had simply done her duty. Future stared hard at her, then continued digging furiously. “Forget it,” he snapped. “What difference does it make if I have to become a peasant again? It will all be clear one day if I’m a counter-revolutionary or not.” And he stomped off.

We finished rewriting our textbook just before our June 30 deadline. Grandly called
A General History of China
, it would be printed by People’s Publishing House. We were guaranteed a national bestseller; all other history textbooks had been removed from the shelves.

We juggled several political campaigns at once. Besides Learning from Facing-the-Sun Agricultural Institute, we also carried out a From Society Back to Society Movement. The latest campaign dashed my classmates’ dream of using a university education as a stepping stone out of misery. Instead, they would all return to their original work units after graduation. At meetings, they fervently pledged to return to their farms, factories and army units. I naively took them at their word, and was deeply moved. I wondered if I would ever be good enough to renounce hot showers.

Neither I nor my classmates knew that the Back to Society campaign was the latest skirmish in the fierce battle between Madame Mao and Zhou Enlai. Premier Zhou, trying to remedy the desperate shortage of graduates, urged universities to concentrate on learning. Madame Mao attacked this as reactionary. As her campaign heated up, Beijing University took her campaign to an extreme,
decreeing that each class had to send a “volunteer” to Tibet. At a meeting in the Big Canteen, there were tears and revolutionary hymns as students in the graduating class a year ahead of us grabbed the microphone and pledged to work in Tibet.

Having gone through so much hard labor at Big Joy, my own classmates were in revolt. Returning to the hellhole you came from was one thing, but they considered Tibet the worst hardship post of all. To them, the altitude was debilitating, the food terrible and the society unspeakably primitive. To lure Chinese cadres to the Roof of the World, the government paid a 40 percent premium on salaries and gave them three months off every year and a half to go home. Even so, there were few takers.

Party Secretary Pan was desperate, for an unfilled quota affected his chances for advancement. He lobbied all the Party members in our class. Each one made excuses or refused pointblank. Then Future shocked everyone. He knew the episode over his stamp collection had ruined his prospects. “Probably I’d be sent to some mountain gully just as poor as Tibet, and I’d have to be grateful because it was near Beijing,” he said. “Why not go to Tibet? This way, they could do nothing, I wouldn’t have to be grateful, and I might have fun.”

Party Secretary Pan was astonished. Future’s application to join the Party was promptly approved, the only one of my classmates to have that honor while at Beijing University. But Pan never talked to Future about his choice, never thanked him, never praised him. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the fact that Future, one of the few students who had ever stood up to him, was the only one revolutionary enough to volunteer for Tibet.

My matchmaker, Betty Zheng, preparing for an English lecture
.
Photo: Jan Wong