The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (13 page)

I was in a state of total shock. The director talked to me for over one hour. In the end, he told me to dig deeper into the root cause of my mistakes and beg forgiveness from the masses and the Party.

I was touched by his willingness to save me. I had witnessed the punishment the Party had dished out to those Rightists back in 1957. I didn't want that. So I promised, with tears flowing and nose running at the same time, that I would do some serious inner examination.

During the next several days, I wrote day and night nonstop. It was ten times more intense than composing my music. I condemned myself multiple times. I piled up a list of the most vicious words to curse myself. I called myself a stinky bad egg. I used all the political jargon available, such as “individualistic, bourgeoisie, and Right-wing opportunist” to label my mistakes. I truly believed that I deserved hundreds of slaps on my face and hundreds of buckets of shit over my head. Like many intellectuals in that era, I sucked up to the Party, hoping that I would be exonerated. When I finished, the report was almost as thick as a small book.

LIAO:
My father used to do the same thing. During the Cultural Revolution, he compiled more than a hundred things which he claimed were his crimes. My father grew up in a landlord's family. When he was two years old, one tenant used to carry him on his back and take him to a market. My father even listed that as his “willful exploitation of the working class.”

WANG:
We were all baring our hearts to the Party. After I submitted it to the director, he asked the Communist Youth League to organize a staff meeting inside a big performance studio. The sound quality there was excellent. In front of over a hundred people, I read aloud my self-criticism. My talk lasted two and a half hours. Several times, I had to stop to wipe my tears. In the end, I felt dizzy and it was like my throat was on fire. Everybody was quiet. I thought they were really touched by the thoroughness and sincerity of my speech. Then—

LIAO:
There was a power outage?

WANG:
Don't I wish it! Someone stood up. It was Niu Jun, the secretary for the Communist Youth League. He played Chinese bamboo flute in the orchestra. He spoke with his piercing tone: That is so fake. Let's not be deceived by Wang Xilin's confession. Let's fight back against the attacks by Wang and his counterrevolutionary clique.

After Niu Jun sat down, a municipal government representative stood up and set the tone: Comrade Niu is absolutely right. Wang Xilin's father was a county sheriff under the Nationalist government. His sister is a convicted Rightist and counterrevolutionary. He covered it up and snuck into our revolutionary ranks. Now, after years of hibernating, he finally jumped out to attack our Party. Comrades, remember what Chairman Mao teaches us: “Never forget class struggle.” This is a class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. We need to be tough. Meanwhile, I also urge everyone sitting here today to examine his or her behavior and to see which camp they want to be in.

I felt like dying. Before I joined the army, the Party knew everything about my family. They had cleared me of any connections with my parents. I just couldn't handle the new accusations. I collapsed onto my seat like a sand castle at high tide.

LIAO:
I thought the director wanted to save you and give you a second chance.

WANG:
That was what I thought too. Later on, I realized that it was orchestrated by the local municipal government because they wanted to “kill the chicken to intimidate the monkeys.” They wanted to make sure that no one in the orchestra dared to challenge the Party again. I became the unfortunate sacrificial chicken.

LIAO:
Did the director talk with you again?

WANG:
Yes. In the period between the fall of 1963 and the spring of 1964, I was ordered to do self-criticism at every public meeting and almost every staff member had the chance to denounce me. Soon, they ran out of material. One day, the director called me again to his office, with the same fatherly look, the same gesture, and the same sigh. After I had experienced months of nightmarish public condemnation and isolation, the director's fatherly look was quite comforting. I began to cry like a child who has been beaten up by bigger kids on the block.

He said: Comrade Xilin, I hope you have learned something from the past month. Don't blame other comrades for their tough attitude toward you. You should be thankful. The Party has confidence in you. Our Party has successfully reformed the last emperor of the Qing dynasty and many former senior Nationalist officials. If those big shots can change, so can you.

My tears just kept flowing. I thanked him profusely. Then he said: We know that you constantly hang out with some members of this orchestra and vent your complaints against the Party. We know everything. We want you to describe in detail every conversation or meeting you have had with other people. Honesty will get you leniency.

Sensing the hesitancy in my eyes, the director patted me on the shoulder and said: The Party needs to help other comrades who have committed similar mistakes. Don't feel guilty. This is a serious class struggle and you are doing them a favor by bringing them back to the Party. After this campaign is over, all of you will be treated as good comrades.

I was a strong believer in the Party's policy—Cooperation leads to leniency. So, I made a list of one hundred incidents where my coworkers and I had made inappropriate remarks about the Party and leaders of the orchestra. In the process, I betrayed my friends, such as the first flutist Zhang Haibo and trumpeter Chen Yingnan.

LIAO:
Under the circumstances, I guess you didn't have too much of a choice.

WANG:
It was a total betrayal. I had too much faith in the Party. After I submitted my list, which I titled “My Second Confession About the Counterrevolutionary Clique Within Our Symphony Orchestra,” the director asked me to read it aloud at an all-staff meeting.

LIAO:
You called your friends members of a counterrevolutionary clique?

WANG:
Yes. The director implied that associating my mistakes with a more serious criminal label would make me sound more sincere. Anyhow, on the list I included my friends and a lot of other people. I didn't even dare to raise my head. I simply read the list mechanically. The meeting became very tense. Initially, people held their breath, waiting to hear who would be the next to be implicated. It was like I had one hundred grenades hanging around my mouth. Each time I uttered an item, I could hear an explosion in the audience. Soon the volume of their responses got louder and louder. One woman suffered a nervous breakdown right there. Let me give you an example of what I put in the list: On the morning of September 6, I bumped into so-and-so. I heard him cursing the Party secretary for not allocating him a new apartment. Then, on the evening of January 19, so-and-so told me over lunch that he thought the deputy director was a jerk.

I finally finished the reading in three hours. As I was uttering a sigh of relief, the whole studio was filled with anger. Each time I mentioned a new name, that person would jump up and try to interrupt me, calling me a liar. They called me all sorts of names—“a vicious Rightist, a hypocrite who deserved to be cut into pieces.” People also started to bite one another with vicious accusations. In the end, my counterrevolutionary clique became bigger and bigger. More than thirty people were implicated. If it hadn't been for the security guards, there would have been fistfights. I would have been trampled to death.

My confessional list moved the whole campaign to a new stage. In order to clear their names, people started to expose the “crimes” of others. For a while, people were spying on one another, trying to collect damaging material to destroy one another.

The emotional ups and downs of the campaign took a heavy toll on my mental health. I started to lose control of myself at several public meetings. The daytime denunciation meetings extended into my dreams. I would scream in my sleep. When I was awake, I would draw the curtain and became afraid of sunlight. I was in constant fear of getting arrested. Each morning, when the loudspeaker in the courtyard started blasting the famous revolutionary song, “Chairman Mao Is Our Savior,” I would jump out of bed, shaking with fear. This paranoia has haunted me for twenty-some years. Even today, when I see a big portrait of Chairman Mao, I literally have goose bumps.

LIAO:
Did you seek treatment?

WANG:
Initially, they said I was afraid of light because I had harbored too much darkness in my heart, and that I was paranoid about getting arrested because I hadn't come clean about all my crimes. Finally, as my illness worsened, they realized it was for real. So they sent me to a mental hospital. The mental illness seemed to run in my family. When my sister was charged with being a Rightist, she had similar symptoms. In my case, I was doing better after getting treatment. At the same time, the number of public meetings was reduced because people were tired of hearing the same crap over and over again. Soon, they seemed to have forgotten about me. I had more time to myself. So I became restless and began to write music again. I finished a symphony, which I named
The Yunnan Musical Poetry.

LIAO:
I've heard it before. It was a great piece.

WANG:
After over twenty years, the piece was finally recognized. I recently won the first prize at a national music contest. It has been played in thirty cities around the world.

LIAO:
It is amazing you could compose that masterpiece under those difficult circumstances.

WANG:
If it hadn't been for my music, you would have seen me in a mental asylum today.

LIAO:
Let's continue with your story. What happened afterward?

WANG:
In April of 1964, the Communist Youth League officially expelled me from the organization. The next day, the director called me to his office. Once again, he said with that fatherly tone: Comrade Xilin, you did a good job admitting your mistakes and exposing the mistakes of others. Considering your positive and cooperative attitude, we have decided to assign you to work for a music and dance troupe in rural Shanxi Province. This will give you the opportunity to thoroughly reform yourself.

LIAO:
How could you still trust that guy?

WANG:
Don't forget that I started receiving Communist education at the age of twelve. I was very brainwashed. I bowed and expressed my gratitude to him. You know what? Some of the friends that I had betrayed got worse treatment. Many members of my so-called counterrevolutionary clique were assigned to the desert regions of Gansu Province. So far, I haven't had the guts to contact any of them.

LIAO:
Did you take the assignment?

WANG:
Of course. Amazingly, I didn't feel depressed at all about my change of fate. I packed my belongings and left for Shanxi the next day. The troupe I worked for was on tour all the time. They traveled from village to village. Each time we arrived at a place, I would cook, prepare hot water for the actors, load and unload trucks, set up the stage and play an extra if needed. I believed that doing menial jobs would change my stinky bourgeois outlook on life.

Several months later, the local leaders realized that I could compose. They ordered me to write lyrics for a choral piece. I did. There were four chapters: “Praising the Stalwart Commune Members,” “The Leaders of the Local Party Are Excellent,” “The New Look of Our Village,” and “Three Communist Flags Wave in the Wind.” Then I was in charge of conducting a chorus of twenty people and an orchestra of thirty musicians. At the opening, many local leaders showed up. They loved my work. The head of the local propaganda department praised me in front of the audience by saying: Wang Xilin has gotten rid of the burdens of his past and he will have a bright future.

For a while, I thought I was finally getting a new lease on life. Then the political climate changed fast. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution started. The local Red Guards checked my personal files and uncovered my past problems. Within days, I was brought back to the public denunciation meetings. All the good work I had done was considered new crimes which aimed to deceive people. Remember the propaganda chief who praised me at the concert? He was accused of being a capitalist admirer and was locked up in a cowshed. Since he liked the lyrics I wrote for the chorus, the Red Guards condemned my work as blades of poisonous grass.

I was the lone enemy in the performance troupe. They paraded me around, with a dunce cap on my head and a black cardboard sign around my neck. I had some new criminal labels: “An escaped Rightist, a hidden counterrevolutionary, a class enemy who covered up his family history . . .” All the self-criticisms I had written before amounted to nothing. I started all over again. The political instructor, who was illiterate, monitored me every day. To regain their trust, I used the same trick. It was like writing a symphony: I put myself as the C major, the main theme. I condemned and slandered myself mercilessly. Then, I divided up people around me in different minor themes or variations.

LIAO:
Did it work?

WANG:
Through self-criticism, I made myself an odious enemy of the people. Big-character posters were pasted all over the walls of the county office building. Most of them were directed at me. I was reassigned to take care of the boilers.

In 1968, at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, local factory workers took over the county government to clean out “a capitalist citadel.” They rounded up all of the disgraced county officials, former landlords, and me, and threw us in a warehouse, which used to be a Japanese army concentration camp. We slept on the floor. Our windows were nailed shut. Our captors practiced what they called “using physical torture to touch the souls.” Beatings were quite frequent. In my group, a guy named Cao Yuzhu had been a lighting engineer for the performance troupe. One time, he had said jokingly to his intern that Vice Chairman Lin Biao looked too sick to lead the country. The intern reported him to authorities. Cao was arrested on charges of slandering the successor to our Great Leader. When the Red Guards paraded Cao on the street, they hung all sorts of lightbulbs around his neck to make fun of his work.