Chapter 8

What eventually became known as the tragic three year countrywide suffering, which lasted from 1959-1961 was caused not only by Party mismanagement, but also by natural disasters. Then, in the middle of our plight, the Soviets unexpectedly
stopped their aid, tore up all their contracts with China, recalled all of their experts and pressured China for payment of all its debts to them. But the Party’s erroneous policies added heavily to this disaster caused by those outside forces. We felt the severe consequences of many of these disasters in our isolated corner of the country. During it all, it was still impossible to know what was really happening outside of our immediate neighborhood. Each month our food became worse and worse. Eventually, for each meal we were given nothing but four ping-pong ball sized rolls of steamed dumpling made of a soft but rough grain I had never seen before. It was dark brown in color and a little bit sticky. Soon most of us got sick, and we knew it was from these mysterious rolls. I eventually grew thinner and thinner until I became totally emaciated.

One day I was carrying a pot of sulfuric acid to the workshop. All of a sudden my right leg lost all strength, and I fell to the ground. The pot broke and the flying acid burned my shoes and legs. It was as painful as a knife cutting into my
flesh. In my pain I hobbled as fast as I could to the nearest tap and washed my legs with water. Afterwards one of my legs collapsed again while I was walking. Seeing that this infirmity was getting worse, kind hearted Old Zhang ended my duties in
the workshop. He knew it was dangerous for me to work with those chemicals in such a condition. He sent me back to our cave dwelling in the old kiln to work as a night watchman. To prevent various types of disturbances at night, I was to sit by the door and keep an eye on the criminal prisoners. They often stole from each other and small brawls would result. However, my health continued to worsen. I couldn’t even lift my legs while walking, but moved ahead by pulling my feet along the ground. I had to detour whenever there was anything as small as a brick on the path in front of me. Now, compounding my fate, the lack of sleep from night duty made my condition even worse.

Everyone was starving. Our salt was restricted for fear of
dropsy. So hungry were we for salt, that once a former miner
mistook a bottle of NaS03 for NaCl. He was dead in less than
twenty minutes, even though we tried desperately to save him.
Given this extreme national situation, it was decided that
all home leaves would be canceled until 1962. In that year,
when home leave was first resumed, on my way home I stopped
to take a bath in a public bathhouse. People looked at me with
amazed and puzzled eyes when I took off my clothes. They
seemed to question, “What’s the matter with this man?” So I
went to the mirror to see what they saw. I looked like a photo I
remembered from a World War II magazine, a photo of a
survivor from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. I was a
good live model for an anatomy class, a skeleton with skin.
My wife burst into tears when she saw my body as I
prepared for bed. I had completely lost all sexual desire. There
was not a bit of it left. I put a pillow between my two knees
while I slept on my side, for it was too painful for my two big
knee bones to touch each other. We lay on the bed with our
eyes open, looking up at the ceiling and wondering what our
future was to be. What else could fall on us? That night seemed
ever so cold and so long.

Shortly after I was imprisoned, my wife could no longer
endure the growing hardship and the political and economic
pressures that came with her husband’s imprisonment.
Therefore, she quit her studies one year before graduation to
work as a stage designer in the art troupe attached to the
Ministry of Geology. An art troupe like this had to travel to
remote areas, so our baby had to be sent away to a nursery only
fifty-six days after his birth.

I eventually learned that his food, the facilities, the
quality of nursery care were also very poor during these three
years of disaster. My young son twice caught pneumonia. The
time I went to see him during my last home leave, the nurse
brought him to me in her arms with tears running down his pale
face. There was no response when he saw me. The nurse told
me that he’d had a high fever and began to sob for she felt I
would blame her for not doing her job well. She seemed to be a
nice, but very young nurse. I realized that it wasn’t her fault my
son was ill. But the tragedy for me was that I didn’t even know
how to hold him. While I hurried him to the hospital his two
little legs were exposed to the cold December air. A woman
passing by shouted at me, “Hey, the baby’s legs are bare!”
When I reached the hospital the doctor put my baby in a ward
for pneumonia patients.

The next morning my wife and I went to the largest
Beijing department store, and found the food section empty,
except for a little pastry of inferior quality. These pastries were
rationed, 250 grams per month for one family. Of course our
ration went wholly for our baby. That meant he could have 60
grams every weekend when he was home from the nursery, and
that would depend on his mother not being away on tour. We
left the store with our ration and went to the Sichuan Restaurant
for a meal with meat “to offer a sacrifice to our teeth.” These
were the only times I could eat meat, which meant only once a
year during that disastrous period. The price for a meal was ten
times higher than normal. Two dishes plus 400 grams of rice
cost at least half the average monthly salary. Yet people cared
little for money compared to their health. Food was necessary
to survive, at any cost. They tried to make the one meal take
the place of all those they had missed for so long. Most could
only afford such a restaurant meal once a month.

In her effort to strengthen me, whenever we were
allowed visitors my wife tried to bring me such nutrient
medicines as royal jelly and vitamins A and D. Such gifts to me
cut deeply into what she and my son needed to survive. I the
provider, was being nurtured by my wife. By early 1962, the
three year disaster was coming to an end, and my health began
to improve little by little.

One morning in the early summer of 1962, the Rightist
label was finally removed from seven of us. After such a long
and painful ordeal, I had no reason to be either happy or
excited. My school, which had promised to keep my post
available for me whenever my punishment ended, went back on
its word. As a result, I was required to remain at the Bei Yuan
Farm for prisoners until I could obtain a new position. My
sadness and disappointment were beyond words. But on the
bright side, there were now two significant differences between
us and the real prisoners—we received a regular salary and we
could go home every Saturday night. My salary was now 45

RMB per month, which was about $10 USD. During this time
however, we were still under the control of the Public Security
Bureau. Nevertheless, I rushed home and pretended to be happy
and excited about life in front of my wife. I took her to one of
the most famous restaurants in Beijing, and we enjoyed the
world famous Beijing roast duck in celebration of the day I
became free again.

The seven of us ex-Rightists were soon transferred to
another farm on the northern outskirts of Beijing. There we were
to do some farm work and serve as watchmen to prevent the
crops from being stolen. But to us, the most important aspect of
our transfer was the opportunity to eat as much good food as
possible. We were allowed to eat outside of the farm on
Sundays and would bring back lots of food to supplement our
meager farm rations on the weekdays. It seemed to work. Some
of us became pretty plump all at once. There was a special
nutrient called hydrolysis protein which was made available to
those who had starved during the three year disaster. Naturally,
everybody in our group used it, but no one knew for sure if it
really worked. But it really didn’t matter, we were all so happy
to have food again. Also, this was the first time that we had the
luxury of a real dormitory. After our daily work most of us could
be found playing poker (but not gambling) in what seemed like
luxurious quarters. I would just lay on my portion of those long
beds and study English grammar from the English Edition of the
Beijing Review.

While out on the farm, my watch post was located under
a big tree which was growing on the bank of a tranquil pond. It
was very quiet and I rarely saw people there. Only crops spread
across the land, along with the aromatic fragrance of many
plants familiar to me since I was a small boy. I lost myself in
thought in such beautiful surroundings and waited to be called
back to school. I wondered about my future day after day, but
nothing ever happened. To dispel the gloom gathering about my
heart I tried to enjoy and learn more about the nature around
me, to understand the place of humans in this world, and what
the world was coming to.

Coincidentally, I found the lives of a great number of
lizards of interest there. I also enjoyed the turtles as they raised
their heads above the water of the pond. The lizards ran back
and forth around me as I sat there day after day. When two of
them met there would often be a fight. They tangled together
with their tails sweeping around and their jaws gripping each
other. My limited knowledge never permitted me to know
whether they were fighting or making love. Sometimes, by the
time they were finished, part of one of their tails would be
broken off, but it would continue to twist and flop around on the
ground as if it had a separate life of its own. I would often catch
hold of one of them. Its skin was very soft and smooth, and the
look of its eyes and touch of its feet became endearing and
personal in my lonely world. They are like humans in some
ways. I was not frightened of them. They were so friendly. But
they didn’t have the evil thoughts and feelings that humans
have.

One sunny day, as I leaned against my straw shelter by
the pond, I saw a baby turtle. Its four feet were stroking
strongly and it swam vertically up to poke its head above water.
Before long, he swam to the bank and climbed onto the shore
attracted by the sunshine. He stretched his long flexible neck to
look cautiously around for anything that might harm him. Then
feeling assured, he drew his head back into his shell to enjoy a
warm nap. That poor shortsighted turtle never saw the human
being nearby nor imagined what that human being had in his
mind. The turtle was small, about an inch and a half long, and
cute. My heart murmured, “Don’t worry, I won’t harm you. I just
want you to be nice company for my son.” I approached him
quietly. As soon as I touched his shell his head darted out, but it
was too late. When I brought him home my wife put him in a
glass jar with water and placed it on the window sill. The next
weekend when I got home the jar was empty. I searched our
rooms in vain. Even though we lived on the fourth floor, we
searched the grounds downstairs too, but we never found him,
dead or alive. I was so sorry that I had taken him from his home
and brought him to this strange prison. His unknown fate
reminded me of my own. Like him, it seemed like I would
never know what my fate was going to be. This little turtle
didn’t understand why he was imprisoned and he wanted his
freedom, no matter the cost. My heart saddened as I realized
that I was no different than him.

One day, I was working on the roof of a small house on
the farm, when the house collapsed under me. Both my legs
were hurt so badly that I had to be carried to the dormitory. The
hospital treatment didn’t seem to help. I wrote a letter to my
wife asking her to buy the traditional Chinese medicine, No. 1
Miraculous Cure, diyilingdan. I had taken it once when I hurt
my shoulder during a swimming competition. It’s a reddish
powder in a small bottle, and it’s very effective. I took two
bottles a day, and I recovered completely after one week. It was
only twelve cents a bottle and was the best medicine for
muscle sprain I have ever known. To this day I still wonder
what it was made of.

That autumn, two of us from the seven reformed Rightist
were transferred to an ice cellar run by the Public Security
Organization. It was our job to break ice from Shichahai Lake
near Bei Hai Park. The ice was to be stored in the cellar and
then sold on the market in Beijing. Cixi, the last Empress
Dowager of the Q’ing Dynasty, loved the sea and wanted to
have it at her door step in Beijing, so she built Shichahai, or
the Shicha Sea for her personal pleasure.

I worked there day and night with several released
criminals. There were two open cellars, each 50 meters long, 30
meters wide, and 6 meters deep, and divided by a clay wall
down the middle. Every year when the lake froze hard enough,
work would begin at once. First we set up a hoist for
transporting the ice blocks from the lake to the waiting truck.
Then with a 40 pound iron tool we cut the iced surface of the
lake by hand into slabs ten meters square. Finally we cut the
ice slabs into about one square meter blocks to carry back to
the cellar. Using the heavy tool to cut the ice, we often slipped
into the ice cold water, so we would bring with us some wine in
hopes of warming up a little within our ice soaked clothes. The
trucks then hauled the ice blocks back to the cellar where we
piled them up in the deep cold rooms. For this work, we put iron
teeth clamps under our shoes to avoid slips and falls while
carrying the ice blocks down the sloping ramp into the cellar.
This cold heavy labor, which always ran late into the
night, created a level of fatigue that was indescribable.
Whenever there was the slightest break between another shift, I
hurried to our bedroom to sleep before our second shift of the
night began. No sooner would I touch my pillow than I would be
fast asleep. Then suddenly, in what seemed like seconds,
someone would shake me awake to begin my next shift. My rest
only lasted 20 minutes, but I felt like I had been in another
century.

When we were selling the ice the next spring, I was
sometimes ordered to deliver the ice on a flat-bed tricycle to
another part of the city. Twice, while making such deliveries, I
encountered former schoolmates. The injustice of my
punishment increased its weight on me as they pretended not to
see me passing by, looking straight forward with motionless
eyes and expressionless faces.

Then, in the late spring of 1963, I was sent away again,
this time to work as a stevedore for a truck driver along with
three released criminals. Late one night the driver ran over an
old woman sleeping along the side of the road and killed her.
This happened on a quiet country road and the old woman never
thought a truck would pass by on this very narrow road so late
at night. But such was the way many people were forced to live
in those days.

Most of the articles we loaded onto the truck from the
railway were chemicals such as hydrochloric, sulfuric, and
nitric acids, toluene, explosive gases and other dangerous
compounds. It was definitely not an easy job. Two of the
criminals were originally dock workers, and were well skilled at
what we did. Upon arriving for my first day on the job, after
taking a good look at me, their laughing eyes told me what they
thought—a newcomer from the academic circle. They just stood
there waiting for me to make a spectacle of myself. My first job
was to move several 140kg barrels. To their great surprise, in
spite of my smaller size, I didn’t show any signs of weakness.
They didn’t know I had once been an amateur body builder, so I
handled those heavy barrels with a skill that was totally
unexpected by them. What they didn’t know was that the
barrels had pushed me to the limits of my weakened strength.
After that initial display we became good friends and they
encouraged me greatly as long as we were together. Although
these men were not educated, being only simple and
straightforward laborers, they proved to be of better character
than many who were much more educated and sophisticated.

On May 3rd, 1963, our second child was born, my dearest
daughter Yi Meng. Three months after her birth my wife and
children were forced to move out of the urban districts of
Beijing. I learned later that there were instructions from high up
in the government that all family members of landlords, rich
peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists,
were to move out of the capital. So they still considered me a
Rightist, even after all those years in reform confinement.
Because of all this, my wife was transferred to a primary school
attached to a drilling equipment factory in a rural area of Tong
Xian, about thirty miles east of downtown Beijing.
Finally, at the end of 1963, I decided to personally visit
the Central Art Institute to try and learn why I was still kept in
the prison factory system. The day I was finally given
permission to take a few hours leave from my duties to make
my inquiries, was also the day of the school’s annual New
Year’s Eve Gala. Eventually I located the member of the
Personnel Division who had sent me to jail. He arrogantly
denied that any public employment at the school had been
reserved for me. How could I argue with him? I had no signed
paper to prove this promise from the Ministry of Culture. Once
again there was nothing I could rely on to protect my rights. The
Party could determine right and wrong as they wished, just as
always. Those friends, colleagues, and former classmates I later
encountered at the party were as cold to me as if I had never
been in this world at all. They didn’t care whether I was alive or
dead. I really had become a non-person! They only cared that
they were the lucky dogs, given better alms by the gods and by
the Party. They sang and danced, but with something buried
deep in their hearts that they could never dare admit to anyone
else. “Once taken as a Rightist and imprisoned, there was no
return to the world of the Communist Party’s dynasty in modern
China.” For their own sake, nobody would dare pay attention to
me. It was truly a question of their own survival.

One night, several weeks later, our kind old team leader,
Zhang, stopped to tell me that they had contacted the institute’s
Party Committee about sending me back to the school, but that
the school had shown an icy manner toward the idea and
stressed their need to, “simplify the school’s staff.” We both
knew this was an excuse to keep me from returning. He added
sympathetically, “Well, forget it. You’d better try to do all you
can now to make your children a brighter future.” These words
implied that there was no future for me at the school. He
seemed to be right. I then tried to find a job in several places. It
proved to be hopeless. No one dared to hire me when they
learned about the trumped up charges on my record. I felt I had
once again been played as the fool. “What should I do?” That
was the question I asked myself all the way home after each
job application. Should I just yield to this reality and live only
for the sake of remaining alive? But wouldn’t this just make me
a real sinner against justice and truth like everyone else? I
suddenly realized that this had become a matter of fighting for
truth.

Strengthened by this new found conviction, I wrote scores
of letters in an attempt to reason with the Party Committee in
our school. There had to be a way to have myself removed from
this prisoners’ status. First, I stressed, as did the Party, that we
must implement the Party’s policies any time, any place.
Second, with regard to their excuse, the need to “simplify the
staff,” I told them that they could wash me out at any time after
I returned to the school. After all, I was still one of their faculty
even though I had been imprisoned. I argued it was a matter of
principle. These two grounds of argument proved to be so strong
that they eventually could find no way to officially refute them.
At 8 am on a hot summer morning, six years and 100
days after my imprisonment had first begun, I was lying in a
sound sleep after working my second shift from 5:30 p.m. to
1:30 a.m. I was awakened by an excited voice which told me
that the chief officer wanted to see me in his office
immediately. As soon as I stepped into his office he looked up
at me and said simply, “Get your baggage and go back to your
school.” Then he added, “Don’t involve yourself in anything
with any of the prisoners anymore. Good luck.”

Arriving back, the Sculpture Research Studio, where I
once worked, evoked painful memories. I felt like I was slowly
awakening from a long and dreadful nightmare. For the first
time in six years, I began to emotionally relax. The streets, the
people walking by, the sunshine, even the air seemed different.
Once again I was on this side of the world. However, I was not
definitely sure how my colleagues would greet me. The 1963

New Year’s Eve Party still burned deeply in my memory. What
I had expected happened. When I arrived at the front office I
met the same cold faces. A woman I had never seen before
received me and led me to a room that I was to share with
someone who was already living there. Suddenly, I recognized
him to be one of my former classmates, Guo. Even though he
was formerly a close friend, he just pulled a long face and
acted as if I were a complete stranger when he learned that I
was to be his new roommate. What seemed so strange was that
he too, had been labeled as a Rightist. He seemed to think I
was a natural born anti-Communist, much worse than himself or
any other Rightist in the school.

About an half hour later the woman from the front office
returned. The situation had changed abruptly. With a
hypocritical smile she said, “Comrade Wu, the library in our
school desperately needs an English resource man. You would
be particularly valuable there since you are an artist, and speak
English fluently. And since there aren’t enough commissioned
works to do here, we decided to send you to work in the library.
The library people have welcomed the news of your arrival. So
you can report there for duty right now.”

It was obvious she had talked the matter over with the
Personnel Division. I was just happy to finally have a position,
but I didn’t learn what was behind this assignment until I saw
one of the big character posters during the so-called, Socialist
Education Movement, which began three months later. There
were so many movements in those days, one after the other!
But that afternoon when I heard her instructions, I simply
picked up my United States serviceman’s traveling bag and left
without a word to my former classmate. I was so hurt I wanted
to leave that cold and dirty air as far behind me as possible. I
sensed that there would still be a very hard road ahead for me,
and that I could never know what my future would be. Anything
could fall upon me again at any time.

So, as instructed, I reported again to the Personnel
Division and was received with a cold professional air by
another woman, Zhou Lan, who was even harder in spirit than
the first. One who seemed proudly aware that she held people’s
destinies within her hands. She looked at me with a pair of
ruthless little triangle eyes and said, “You can share a room
with two other workers at the right corner of the playground.
Your salary is 56 RMB per month. It is lower than you
ordinarily should have, but after all you have been a Rightist.”
Again I left without a word. There was no use defending myself.
If they wanted to do something, they would do it. There is a
Chinese belief that a person with triangle eyes must be ruthless.
I don’t know if there is any scientific grounds for such a belief,
but it was true in this short woman’s case. A personnel
department ought to understand and know its people well
enough to bring their initiative and professional knowledge into
fullest play for the benefit of the institution. It should pay
attention to people and give them the help that would be of
benefit to all. But this woman did the opposite and seemed to
enjoy making people suffer. As a Party cadre she had lifelong
tenure in her position, like a tumbler toy she could fall over but
would always come back up again. I think this practice is a
fatal flaw in our political system. When an employer has no
right to hire or fire the employees under his supervision and
responsibility, then evildoers, supported by lifelong tenure, have
nothing to fear and can do whatever they please.

After nearly seven years of nightmare, and my new
position secured at the school, I finally was on my way home.
According to common sense I should have been very excited
and happy. It didn’t happen like that. I simply couldn’t be
happy. The thought of the long distance to my home from the
school began to hurt me deeply before I even left. The place
where our home was now located was the mark of my bitter and
humiliating past. Why couldn’t we still live and work in
Beijing? Why couldn’t we go back to where we belonged?
When I finally reached our door and knocked, the door opened,
and I read the same feeling on my wife’s face. I couldn’t find
the real happiness we deserved. Both of us felt that even though
the label of Bourgeois Rightist had been removed from me, I
was still considered a counter-revolutionary Rightist in the
Party’s eyes. We could feel that everywhere we were being
treated unequally. Our nightmare was not really over. Even
today, every time I go back to Beijing, I still can’t visit those
old places where once I had lived. They arouse such deep
feelings of pain within me.

In my desperate efforts to break this chilly feeling from
my wife and to calm her, I took her to a famous Sichuan
Restaurant to dine on her favorite foods. On our way, looking at
her weather-beaten face, I was lost in thought with the sad
feelings, “It has been nearly seven years! Not the one year I
had assured her of before I was taken away from home by the
police.” Criminals are given a specified sentence of
imprisonment, but not us—the political prisoner. It had tortured
us so badly. Every day and night we wished and prayed that we
would be free the next year, the next month, maybe even the
next day! I had suffered severely from this spiritual torture. But,
how had my wife passed through these long years? Alone,
without anyone to help her.

Not long before our baby daughter was born, one of the
authorities in my school came to her asking to use our house for
someone’s wedding. Since my wife was usually home from her
school only on weekends, this seemed like a reasonable
request. They knew very well that my wife could only say,
“yes”, as she was the wife of a political prisoner. They just took
this opportunity to exploit her. As the weeks passed by, they
never gave back our home, our furniture, or personal belongings.
My wife could only swallow this humiliating insult alone and in
silence. Even my little boy, Jiemeng, often being bullied by the
other children because of my crimes, had to suffer. Though he
was only six, he seemed to understand why his mother was
always forced to endure all of those humiliations. There had to
be something wrong with everyone! So, he was compelled to
swallow all of those insults in silence, just like we adults.
Today, I can still see this cruel scar in his personality. Often he
just keeps silent, alone in his own thoughts, but with a pair of
indignant eyes staring out at the world.

My wife could not continue her studies in the school any
longer. She had a new nursing baby and no income other than a
little school granted aid. The hardest thing to endure, however,
was the pressure of humiliation from everywhere around her.
With her now working in an art troupe outside of the region, she
was compelled to leave our new baby to a public nursery. Life
was so hard on her that she could barely survive.

By this time, the whole country was in the throes of a
terrible disaster. A half pound of dough was the only food ration
each month for my wife and our poor baby. In the nursery there
was more food for our child. Often she had little pickles with
rice as her only meal each day. There was also no spare money
for her to buy clothes for our son, so she saved every bit of old
clothing and sheets which should have been thrown away as
scraps, and made our child his cloths, bed sheets, shoes, any
thing she could make from this debris. One day she realized
that I needed more jackets, as I would be soaked through with
sweat during those hard days of laboring in the cold. She didn’t
have the money to buy new material, so she sent me jackets
she made out of two pieces of worn-out-old bed sheets,
connected at both sides by cloth strips. They served their
function to keep me warm, no matter how strange their
appearance.

Then in 1963, when all Bourgeois Rightist were required
to move out of Beijing, my wife was forced to move to Tong
Xian (Tong County). There was no one to help her with this
difficult move. She was then assigned to teach in an elementary
school attached to a large factory. People there all realized my
wife was the family member of a Bourgeois Rightist and that
was the reason for her transfer there. She continued to live and
work there with our two children, then finally with me, as a
second class citizen, until the day she died. She had been a
beautiful, lively woman, full of positive energy and smiles! She
had built a life of great expectations for her future, but then,
after years of grief and hardship, the most kind hearted woman,
my dearest wife Minghua, died of cancer when only halfway
through her life. Could it have been a broken heart? Could this
have been murder?

After my painful journey home, I returned to school to
begin my work at the library as an English resource specialist.
In truth, however, most of my time was devoted to cutting
stencils. While in the library I read English books when the
working hours were over, and then reluctantly went to my room
when exhaustion eventually overcame me. My room was
originally a small room for storing sports apparatus. All I was
allowed in this small cell was a wooden bed.

It was during this year that my son began primary school,
and my one year old daughter was enrolled in the same nursery
that my son had been enrolled in years before. I could take her
home from the nursery only on Saturday afternoons. Then I
would take her back to the nursery on Monday morning, for our
home was much too far from the nursery to bring her back and
forth every day.

One night around nine, I was abruptly told that my
daughter was very ill. I ran to her nursery as quickly as possible.
Arriving at that late hour I could not hire a car to take her
home. She had the measles and was running a very high fever. I
watched alone at her side and tried to cool the fever with cold
water and wet towels until daybreak. Then I was able to carry
her home by bus. There she fell into convulsions. In desperation,
I took her to the doctor at Xuanwu Hospital, a hospital well
known for its Department of Neurology. In an effort to stop the
convulsions, the doctor prescribed luminal to be taken for at
least two years and preferably a third, just to be safe. She took
the medicine for two months before I found that luminal had
serious side effects, one of which was a body function
imbalance. I quit this medicine at once, and searched every
possible way for an appropriate traditional Chinese medicine,
for those medicines have less or no side effects.

Finally I heard there was a very good Chinese traditional
doctor in a town only five miles from our home. But he was out
of work for he was labelled a counter-revolutionary and no one
dared to go to him for help. Of course, such labels meant
nothing to me. I knew the line drawn between ourselves and the
enemy all too well. I hurried to the doctor’s home for help.
Perhaps he was touched by my trust in him, for he received me
in spite of being prohibited from practicing medicine. He
carefully inquired about my daughter’s illness and then gave me
a prescription. It was for a traditional Chinese ready-made
medicine, Niuhuang Zhenjing. The name means a pill to sedate
infantile convulsion by bezoar of ox. This medicine worked very
well with only the slightest side effects.

In addition, I learned a useful emergency measure. My
daughter’s convulsions were easily triggered whenever she ran a
high temperature. So, whenever she caught a cold and became
even mildly feverish, I watched by her side with an acupuncture
needle in my hand. I would prick the needle into the point
called renzhong, located one third of the distance from the nose
to the mouth. I would prick her as soon as I saw the slightest
symptom of convulsion. The symptom would be checked in just
a few seconds. She has long since recovered completely from
these symptoms, and is now free of any seizures. After
thousands of years, there really is something to traditional
Chinese medicine, and in this instance I was very happy with
its results.

Within two months of my return from the prison system,
the nationwide Socialist Education Movement started up. In rural
areas it was called the Four Clean-Ups—clean up politics,
ideology, organization, and the economy. After all my years of
political suffering I was not looking forward to another
government movement with much joy. As a routine, the Party
called everyone to write big character posters to bring all
problems and troubles to light. All of a sudden the school
auditorium and the walls outside were filled with these posters.
People viewed these posters nervously and restlessly, uncertain
of what might follow. As in the past no one knew when, or if,
the movement might touch their own lives.

People continued to look at me with somewhat strange
expressions. My reappearance at this time caused my
colleagues to recall 1957, when they last saw me. I was to them
someone who was persistently anti-Communist, anti-Party,
negatively critical of the socialist system, a reactionary airman,
and a public advocate of “American imperialist style
democracy and freedom.” In short I was a Rightist and a
counter-revolutionary from head to toe. The question was now,
had I really changed after over six years of imprisonment, as
had been officially decreed? Had I been reformed into a brand
new person? Most people took their cue from the Party leaders.
Because I was still discriminated against, I must still be
suspect, so people steered clear of me. Those who had
succeeded in creating my crimes in the first place seemed
uneasy to see me again. They prayed I couldn’t stand up freely
any longer against them. It was very simple, if I was right that I
had been wronged, then they were wrong; and if they were right
then I must be wrong. It was simple. To them, I must be a
Rightist.

Even my former class mates kept their distance to avoid
getting involved in my troubles. Once Mrs. Xia happened to run
into me in the corridor. She greeted me and we had a little chat.
This small encounter later caused her to be criticized for not
drawing a clear line between us. I understood then that I was
still considered a Rightist by the Party. Only now it was without
a formal label. I had to live alone in my own world and learn to
enjoy it. I knew that I would be vulnerable to attack whenever
there was a new political movement. It was for this reason that I
felt I still had to get involved and know what was going on in
the school’s political sphere.

I walked around to look at the posters. Suddenly my
name struck my eye like a piercing bullet. It came from a
poster in the corner of our auditorium. I read it thoroughly,
missing not one word, paying the people around me no mind. It
was an accusation aimed at the head of the sculpture studio
where I used to work. His criminal act was that he held that I
should be allowed to come back to the studio from my
prisoners’ exile, and that he spoke in favor of my abilities. I
abruptly realized the conflict that I had walked into when I first
returned. He had pointed out that it was only their boycott that
kept me from my original post. All of this personal hostility and
criticism hurt my self respect very much. I swore in my heart,
“The day must come that I’ll breathe freely in vindication.”
It was not long before the whole school set off for Xingtai
City, in Hebei Province, to take part in the Four Clean Ups in
that rural area. A few people were left to look after the school. I
was chosen to be one of them because I had no right to take
part in such political affairs. I was kept working in the library,
which I did not object to, for I felt much better alone. I took this
as a favorable opportunity to read and learn. This unexpected
opportunity lasted for two years, until the spring of 1966, when
the next dreadful political movement began. This time it was
the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which proved to be a
terrible disaster without parallel in human history.