The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (24 page)

My neighbour came running when she heard the noise. She called a doctor, but though he lived nearby, he told her that he did not dare to come because a certificate of special permission was required for him to make an emergency visit to a member of a household that was under investigation.

Another neighbour who came hurrying round was an old professor. He had somehow picked up the notion that soy sauce should be rubbed into burns and poured a whole bottle of it on to my hand; it stung so excruciatingly that I fell to the floor writhing in agony and passed out.

When I came round, I was lying in bed and my mother was sitting beside me, holding my bandaged left hand in both of hers, reproaching herself for asking me to use the stove alone.

To this day, I find it hard to understand how that doctor could have let our family’s political status prevent him from coming to my aid.

As the ‘daughter of a capitalist household’, my mother was soon detained for investigation as well, and forbidden to return home. My brother and I were moved to living quarters for children whose parents were in prison.

At school, I was forbidden to take part in singing and dancing activities with the other girls because I was not to ‘pollute’ the arena of the revolution. Even though I was short-sighted, I was not allowed to sit in the front row in class because the best places were reserved for children born to peasants, workers or soldiers; they were deemed to have ‘straight roots and red shoots’. Similarly, I was forbidden to stand in the front row during PE lessons, though I was the smallest in the class, because the places nearest the teacher were for the ‘next generation of the revolution’.

Along with the other twelve ‘polluted’ children who ranged from two to fourteen years in age, my brother and I had to attend a political study class after school, and could not participate in after-school activities with children of our age. We were not allowed to watch films, not even the most fervently revolutionary ones, because we had to ‘thoroughly recognise’ the reactionary nature of our families. In the canteen, we were served food only after everyone else because my paternal grandfather had once ‘helped the British and American imperialists take food from Chinese mouths and clothes off Chinese backs’.

Our days were regulated by two Red Guards barking orders:

‘Out of bed!’

‘Go to class!’

‘Go to the canteen!’

‘Study the Quotations of Chairman Mao!’

‘Go to sleep!’

Without any family to protect us, we followed the same mechanical routine day after day, with none of the smiles, games or laughter of childhood. We did the housework ourselves, and the older children helped the younger ones to wash their clothes, faces and feet every day; we only had one shower a week. At night, we all – boys and girls together – slept squeezed together on straw bedding.

Our one small comfort lay in trips to the canteen. No one chatted or laughed there, but kind people sometimes slipped small parcels of food to us surreptitiously.

One day, I took my brother, who was not yet three years old, to stand at the end of the canteen queue, which was unusually long. It must have been a day of national celebration, for roast chicken was being sold for the first time, and the delicious smell wafted through the air. Our mouths watered; we had eaten nothing but leftovers for a long time, but we knew there would be no roast chicken for us.

My brother suddenly burst into tears, shouting that he wanted roast chicken. Afraid that the noise would annoy the Red Guards and that they would turn us out, leaving us with no food at all, I did my best to coax my brother to stop. But he continued crying, getting more and more upset; I was so petrified that I was on the verge of tears myself.

Just then, a motherly-looking woman walked past. She tore off some of her roast chicken, gave it to my brother and walked off without a word. My brother stopped crying, and was just about to start eating when a Red Guard ran up, snatched the chicken leg from his mouth, threw it on to the ground and trampled it to mush.

‘You pups of imperialist running dogs, you’re fit to eat chicken too, are you?’ the Red Guard shouted.

My brother was too scared to move; he ate nothing that day – and he did not cry or make a fuss over roast chicken or any such luxury for a long time after that. Many years later, I asked my brother if he remembered that incident. I am glad to say that he did not, but I cannot forget it myself.

My brother and I lived in the home for almost five years. We were lucky compared to other children, some of whom lived there for nearly ten.

In the home, the children trusted and helped each other. All of us were equal there. But there was no place for us in the outside world. Wherever our little troupe went, people would recoil as if we had the plague. Mature adults would express their sympathy with silence, but children humiliated and insulted us. Our clothes were streaked with gobs of spit or phlegm, but we did not know how to defend ourselves, let alone how to fight back. Instead, self-loathing was branded into our hearts.

The first person to spit at me was my best friend. She said, ‘My mother says your grandfather helped those horrible English people eat Chinese flesh and drink Chinese blood. He was the very, very worst of all bad people. You’re his grandchild, so you can’t be a good person either.’ She spat at me, walked away and never spoke to me again.

One day, I was huddled at the back of the classroom, crying after being beaten up by the ‘red’ children. I thought I was alone, and was startled when one of my teachers came to stand behind me and patted my shoulder lightly. Through my tears, it was hard to read the expression on his face in the dim light of the lamps, but I could see that he was gesturing for me to follow him. I trusted him because I knew that he helped poor people outside the school.

He walked with me to a hut by the side of the playground where the school stored its junk. He opened the lock very quickly and ushered me in. The window was covered with newspapers, so it was very dim inside. The room was piled high with jumbled odds and ends, and smelled of mould and decay. I stiffened in distaste, but the teacher wriggled his way through the junk with the ease of long practice. I fought my way in after him.

In the inner room, I was amazed to find a neat, well-ordered library. Several hundred books were arranged on broken planks. For the first time, I understood the meaning of a famous line of poetry: ‘In the darkest shadow of the willows, I suddenly came upon the bright flowers of a village.’

The teacher told me that this library was a secret that he was planning as a gift for future generations. No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity. The more he spoke, the more excited he became, but the more afraid I grew. I knew that it was these very books which the Cultural Revolution was fighting to destroy. The teacher gave me a key to the hut and told me that I could take refuge and read there at any time.

The hut was behind the only toilet in the school, so it was easy for me to go there without being noticed when the other children were taking part in activities I was barred from.

On my first few visits to the hut, I found the smell and the darkness stifling, so I poked a pea-sized hole into the newspapers over the window. I peered out at the children playing, dreaming that one day I might be allowed to join in.

When the bustle in the playground had made me too sad to go on looking out of the window, I started to read. There were not many elementary readers among the books in the library, so I had great difficulty with the obscure vocabulary. At first, the teacher would answer questions and explain things when he came to check up on me; later he brought me a dictionary, which I used diligently, though I still only understood about half of what I read.

The books on Chinese and foreign history fascinated me. They taught me about different ways of life: not only about the dramatic stories that everybody knew, but about ordinary people weaving their own history through their daily lives. From these books, I also learned that many questions remained unanswered.

I learned a great deal from the encyclopaedia, which saved me trouble and expense later in life, for I can now turn my hand to manual work and repairs on everything from bicycles to small electrical appliances. I used to dream of becoming a diplomat, a lawyer, a journalist or a writer. When I had the opportunity to choose a profession, I left my administrative job in the army after twelve years to become a journalist. The passive knowledge I had accumulated in my childhood helped me once again.

My dream of joining in with the other children in the playground never came true, but I gained comfort from reading about battles and bloodshed in that secret library. The records of war made me feel lucky to be living in peacetime, and helped me to forget the taunts that awaited me outside the hut.

The first person to show me how to see happiness and beauty in life by observing the people and things around me was Yin Da.

Yin Da was an orphan. He did not seem to know how he had lost his parents; all he knew was that he had grown up under the care of his neighbours in the village while living in a hut 1.5 metres long by 1.2 metres wide, containing only a bed which took up the whole room. He had eaten the rice of a hundred families and worn the clothes of a hundred households, and called all the villagers Mother and Father.

I remember Yin Da only having one set of clothes. In winter he simply wore a thick, padded cotton jacket over his summer clothes. Everyone around him was poor, so a padded jacket for the winter was comfort enough.

Though Yin Da must have been five or six years older than I was, we were in the same class at the army school. During the Cultural Revolution, virtually all institutions of education were frozen; only military schools and colleges were allowed to continue to train young people in matters of national defence. To show support for the peasants and workers from the town occupied by the military base, my school arranged for the local children to be educated alongside army children. Many of them were already fourteen or fifteen when they started primary school.

If Yin Da was around when I was being beaten up, spat at or called names by the children from ‘Red’ families, he would always stand up for me. Sometimes, when he saw me crying in a corner, he would tell the Red Guards that he was taking me to get to know the peasants and would lead me on a tour of the town. He would show me the houses of very poor people, and tell me what made these people happy, even though they earned much less than a hundred yuan a year.

At break time, Yin Da would take me up the hill behind the school to look at the trees and flowering plants there. There were many trees of the same kind in the world, he said, yet no two leaves were the same. He told me that life was precious and that water gave life by giving of itself.

He asked me what I liked about the town where the military base was. I said I did not know, there was nothing to like; it was a small, shabby, colourless place, filled only with the choking smoke of cooking fires, and people walking about in torn jackets and ragged shirts. Yin Da taught me to look at and think about each house in the town carefully, even the ones cobbled together from scrap. Who lived in these houses? What did they do inside? What did they do outside? Why was that door ajar? Was the family inside waiting for someone or had they forgotten to close the door? What consequences would their forgetfulness bring?

I followed Yin Da’s advice to find interest in my surroundings and was no longer so saddened by the spitting and taunts I encountered every day. I would be wrapped up in my own thoughts, imagining the lives of the people in the houses. The contrast between imaginary and real worlds was to become a source of both comfort and sorrow for me.

At the end of the 1960s, relations between China and the Soviet Union broke down completely, and an armed conflict over China’s northern border took place on Zhenbao island. Every town and city had to dig tunnels as air-raid shelters. In some big cities, the shelters were capable of accommodating the entire population. Simple equipment and food reserves would enable them to survive in the tunnels for several days. Everyone from old to young was set to digging these tunnels; even children as young as seven or eight were not excused.

The children in our school had to dig tunnels into the side of the hill behind the school. We were split into two groups, one working inside the tunnel and one outside. Though I was assigned to the group inside, I was set to work at the mouth of the tunnel because I was a girl, and relatively weak.

One day, about half an hour after we had started work, there was a great roaring sound: the tunnel had collapsed. Four boys were buried inside, including Yin Da, who had been the furthest in. By the time they had been dug out, four days after the accident, their bodies could only be told apart by their clothes.

The children and dependants of ‘Black’ families were not permitted a last look at the four boys, who had been posthumously recognised as heroes. From afar, my last glimpse of Yin Da was of his lifeless arm dangling from a stretcher.

Yin Da once taught me the theme song from the film
A Visitor to Ice Mountain
. It had a beautiful melody, and the lyrics remembered a lost friend. Years later, when China had begun to open up and reform, this film was shown again. Memories of Yin Da came flooding back.