Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (25 page)

I looked around me with newly skeptical eyes. Was the public
rejoicing genuine? Or was I being duped again? My faith in Maoism had been eroding slowly, but I had always wanted to believe, always kept trying to believe, that there was a better place in the world. Now it was my turn to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. What had I been doing with my life? I had turned people in. For what? I had struggled to dig ditches in the countryside. Again, for what? I had tried to reform my bourgeois mind by reading Mao’s
Selected Works
. Who cared? Nobody believed in the revolution any more. They hadn’t for a long time, and I had been too stupid to see it.

One stunning, immediate change was an end to xenophobia. In Mao’s time, it took nine years for the first Chinese person to dare invite Norman home. At the university, many classmates had shunned me because they were afraid of foreigners. Suddenly, I was able to meet all kinds of people. I made friends with a ninety-year-old gourmet, hung out with avant-garde artists and attended my first underground disco dance. People began revealing their honest opinions. I had lived in China for four years, and I realized that my understanding had just begun.

The celebrations over the fall of the Gang of Four ended the mourning period for Mao. Norman and I decided it was a good time to get married. But our nuptial plans were derailed when we discovered Norman needed a
wet hun zheng
, a document only a Communist bureaucrat could have dreamed up. It was literally a “not-yet-married certificate,” and was required before authorities would issue a marriage certificate. Alas, no Chinese work unit was willing to vouch for Norman because he had arrived in China at the possibly-already-married age of twenty-two. We gave up the idea of getting married. Then we discovered that only newlyweds were issued ration coupons to buy a double bed. We cleverly beat the system by pushing together two single beds. The Foreign Languages Press sympathized with our lack of a not-yet-married certificate and turned a blind eye, allotting us a studio apartment, anyway. But friends insisted we couldn’t just live together; we had to have a traditional wedding to mollify the neighbors. We set the date for the following weekend without realizing we had picked Halloween.

I invited my whole class, taking care to go through the proper channels, namely Party Secretary Pan. Our wedding lasted two days and cost $15, a bargain considering we had more than a hundred guests. In the waning days of the Cultural Revolution, most bridal couples offered only “happiness candy” and tea, since traditional feasting was still considered bourgeois. I compromised. Besides tea and a bag of the delicious caramel candies that had sustained me through Big Joy, I bought peanuts, sunflower seeds, a jar of Chinese-made dill pickles, several loaves of brown bread, a hunk of liver pâté and a bottle of
maotai
. A cook at the Press fried a huge batch of pastel-colored shrimp chips.

Norman wore the same Mao suit he had worn to the Great Helmsman’s funeral. I, of course, had nothing to wear. Chinese brides in the mid-1970s wore gray pantsuits. I went to the corner inconvenience store to hunt for something more … bridal. Next to the gaudy enamel spittoons and wooden washboards, I found the perfect item: a bright red floral-print peasant’s jacket of thick cotton fleece that only a country bumpkin would deign to wear.

On our wedding morning, Norman and I prepared for the reception by lugging a dozen thermoses of hot water from the boiler across the courtyard to our third-floor walk-up. His colleagues in the art department of
China Reconstructs
stuck red Double-Happiness papercuts on our whitewashed walls. Someone had composed a poetic couplet in beautiful calligraphy, which they pasted down the sides of our closet door: “Today you fulfill an old wish to plant flowers of happiness. Love binds like minds, traveling a thousand
li
to raise revolutionary crops.”

By midafternoon, our room was packed. The little children of Big Xu and Betty, our matchmakers, walked in dangling a pole of lit firecrackers, a good luck symbol. Our wedding presents included a Chinese cleaver, two flowered porcelain dishes, a wooden chopping board, an aluminum kettle and a wok, all decorated with more papercuts of the red Double-Happiness character. No one gave us Mao’s
Selected Works
, luckily, because we already had eight and a half sets. I loved the papercuts so much I left them up the entire time we lived at the Foreign Languages Press, like the dreaded neighbor who never takes down the Christmas lights.

Chinese wedding guests traditionally try to humiliate the bride and groom by asking them to recount their courtship. Liu Yifang, the jolly woman who had helped attack Norman for changing his padded pants in the office, started off the proceedings by asking how we had met. As a Chinese bride, I was supposed to cast my eyes demurely downward and giggle a lot. But I didn’t know that. When Norman remained silent, I thought I’d better speak up.

“I met him at a party – not a Communist Party,” I began. “I thought he was Chinese.” The room fell silent in amazement as I proceeded, in my red peasant top, to give a blow-by-blow description of our courtship, including how Norman had brought me take-out food when I broke my toe doing hard labor. They thought I was the funniest foreigner since Khrushchev. Liu Yifang laughed so hard she cracked one of our beds.

The next day, dozens more friends came for a second round of tea and sunflower seeds. But as I swept up the mess at the end of the second night, I realized with a tightness in my chest that not a single classmate had shown up, not even my roommate. Many weeks later, when I overcame my hurt to ask Future why no one had come, he looked surprised. “I didn’t know about your wedding,” he said. Party Secretary Pan, it turned out, had never passed on my invitation.

Our
China Reconstructs
room had wooden floors painted a reddish brown. The sunlight poured through our single window. At night, we heard drunken cyclists weaving their way home, singing snatches of Beijing opera. I hung tea cups on hooks from our small bookcase as an earthquake warning system. When they tinkled during an aftershock, we ducked into our closet, rumored to be the safest place if the building collapsed.

Our single room was once part of a four-room apartment. A surly Chinese family now occupied two rooms on one side of us. Three single Chinese women, with whom we shared a kitchen and a bathroom, lived in the room on the other side. We had hot water only twice a week, for exactly one hour each time. That made it logistically tough for the three of them and the two of us to each undress, bathe, dress, empty and refill the tub before the water shut off. I
struck a deal with the women. They could take the whole hour providing the last one managed to refill the tub at the end. I learned to toss an old plastic sheet over the tub to keep the water hot for hours. Norman and I could then wash at our leisure. The downside was we had to share the bathwater, but at least we were newlyweds.

After the Gang’s purge, our long bouts of physical labor stopped. But the political campaigns continued. Instead of attacking Deng, we now denounced the Gang of Four. No one was very enthusiastic. The more we criticized the Gang for their botched education policies, the more we were admitting we had learned nothing. But at least it meant that, after years of persecuting others, the hard-liners in our class were now the target. Party Secretary Pan soon took to his bed and stayed there for six months. Some students suspected he was feigning illness to avoid being criticized. In fact, he had the flu and, later, tuberculosis.

Bright Pearl spent her days glumly writing self-criticisms. After she graduated, she was punished with a year of hard labor and later went back to Kunming in disgrace. In 1978, she was assigned to teach high school, the very fate she had hoped to avoid. Eventually, she became a professor at the Yunnan Provincial Minorities Institute.

Bright Pearl never married. She had to be single to attend university. At graduation, when she should have married, she was mired in political problems. By the time she extricated herself, she was nearly forty. Years later, even Future felt sorry for her. Spinsterhood or bachelorhood was a horrible fate in China. A single person was a social misfit, doomed to a life sentence in a collective dormitory with smelly latrines and no kitchen. Even gays, who had no choice but to remain in the closet because homosexuality was, and still is, illegal, married the opposite sex, often without revealing their secret to their spouses. They did this partly for camouflage and partly because staying single was socially unacceptable. In all my years in China, Bright Pearl was the only person I knew who had never married.

With only a few months left before graduation, everyone hit the books. But it was clear we had learned very little history or classical Chinese. In acknowledgment of that dismal situation, the school
dispensed with final exams. Cadre Huang insisted, however, that I take one.

“I have done everything the Chinese students have done. Why change at this point?” I said. The double standard infuriated me now.

“Don’t worry. It won’t be difficult,” he said.

“That’s not the point. Why bother with an exam? It’s hypocritical. Everything we learned has been discredited.”

“If you don’t write the exam, you won’t graduate,” he said flatly.

“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t about to cooperate with a last-minute charade.

True to his threat, Huang saw to it that Beijing University gave me a certificate saying I had
yi ye
, or completed the courses, as opposed to
hi ye
, or graduated. (Many years later, I discovered that in fact the university had recorded me as a graduate.)

We were the first class to graduate after the purge. The propaganda machine accused my classmates of having used personal connections to get into university. The once-glorious label “worker-peasant-soldier student” became a badge of shame. Toward the end of term, we gathered for a speech by a school official. “We hope you will make a contribution wherever you are sent,” he said. “What happened at Beijing University was not your fault. We were all caught in the forces of history.”

Graduation day that July was the most depressing moment of our university experience. It was unmarked by a ceremony of any kind. It was as if we were a collective embarrassment, as if the university just wanted to get rid of us, to put its crazy Cultural Revolution phase behind. Already the school was focusing on the incoming batch of freshmen students, the first class in a decade to take proper entrance exams. My demoralized classmates gathered in the same dingy room where we had once mourned Mao. Party Secretary Pan began to read out the assignments. By then the Back to Society campaign had bitten the dust. Except for Bright Pearl, most classmates got decent jobs. Not one went back to being a peasant or a worker. When Pan finished reading, he passed around a stack of small red booklets, our graduation certificates. When the last one had been passed out, people drifted away. And that was it. We had graduated.

Marching to celebrate the purge of Madame Mao’s Gang of Four
.
Photo: Jan Wong

Demonstrating how to make Christmas punch to a television audience of 400 million, with a British friend, Peng Wenlan
.
Photo: Xu Shimin

A
month after my worker-peasant-soldier class graduated, the Chinese Communist Party formally declared an end to the Cultural Revolution. One announcement, and we were consigned to the dust heap of history. That, I suddenly realized, was how dictatorships worked. Overnight, every single person I knew made an abrupt ideological switch. Now, everyone told me, the Cultural Revolution had been a bad, bad thing. They said they had been waiting for years for the madness to end. And unlike before, they assured me, they meant it.

I felt betrayed, like the victim of a massive practical joke. Everyone had lied to me — my classmates and teachers, my friends and relatives. I knew it was not personal. They had had no choice. But it didn’t alleviate my sense of being suckered. I vowed I would never again wholeheartedly suspend my disbelief. I believed them now only because it finally made sense. But from here on in, I promised myself, I would question everything. I wouldn’t just listen to what people said, I would observe what they did and their body language while they did it.