In late 1965, with the suppression of the drama, Hairui Dismissed from Office, we saw the birth of the Cultural Revolution. This was a play written by Wu Han, the vice-mayor of Beijing, who was a distinguished historian. His drama dealt with an administrative officer during the Ming dynasty who fought to rid the people of a tyrant and return farmland to the peasants. Hairui became a god in the people’s hearts, especially when he dared to criticize the emperor. For this major crime, he was dismissed from office. Wu Han’s drama was accused of using the past to criticize the present. Some party officials interpreted it as referring to the Lushan Meeting of 1959, where Marshall Peng Dehuai had been dismissed from office for criticizing Mao’s Three Red Banners policy. Eventually, Mao himself criticized the play by pointing out that its focus was on Hairui’s dismissal from office after championing the people. Therefore, Mao used this distorted logic to charge that Wu Han was anti-Party and anti-Socialist.
Shortly after the charges against Wu Han became public, a new element in Chinese politics, the four top ranking Party cadres now known as the Gang of Four began their own evil drama to seize supreme power. Making use of their various posts, these four wrote articles one after another viciously attacking Wu Han and declared him guilty of treason. However, some, such as Deng Xiaoping and Beijing’s mayor, Peng Zhen, saw the matter differently. They held the play to be a matter of academic discussion without any relation to Marshall Peng. They pointed to the historical lessons of the Stalin Era, and held that in academic matters we should seek truth through facts and everyone should be considered equal and without bias before the truth. They stated that in socialism, we should not make arbitrary decisions and force people to submit, but convince people by reason.
Mayor Peng Zhen tried to check the play’s criticism by
drawing it into a public academic discussion. After that effort,
one explosion followed another in the news. Mao charged that
authority in academic circles and education was still in the
hands of bourgeois intellectuals. The more the socialist
revolution advanced, the more the intellectuals would resist,
and the more their true anti-Communist and anti-Socialist faces
would be exposed. This simple idea became his bugle call
announcing the coming of the Cultural Revolution. He went so
far as to charge that many, like Vice-mayor Wu, although
members of the Communist Party, were in fact anti-Communist
Nationalists and sympathizers of the KMT. Mao also pointed to
the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party,
portraying them as “a sheaf of bad elements, where even a
needle or a drop of water could not get through.” Throughout all
of this ideological chaos, the original five person committee
which had recently been appointed to lead the Cultural
Revolution was suddenly dismissed with the announcement that
a new committee was to be established.
At this time in the evolution of the Chinese Communist
Party the four leading Party cadres who saw this period of
internal ideological strife and chaos as the perfect opportunity
to seize the leadership of the Cultural Revolution, began to do
so for themselves. It was under the great influence and behind
the scenes power of a mysterious third rate actress, Jiang Qing,
that the Gang of Four was able to solidify its control over the
Cultural Revolution Committee. This power hungry actress had
become the wife of none other than Mao himself. She was
joined in her quest for national prominence by Chen Boda, and
their two advisors, Kang Sheng and Wang Hong Wen. At that
time no one imagined the amount of power that Mao would
eventually permit this new Cultural Revolution Committee to
wield within Chinese politics, government, and society, to say
nothing of their permanent effect upon our culture. We would
all soon watch in horror as these four become the root of
China’s unprecedented suffering.
The first political battle of the Cultural Revolution
culminated in the fall of Beijing’s Mayor, Peng Zhen.
Newspapers throughout the country ferociously attacked the
Beijing evening newspaper serial Three Family Village. They
accused this serial of being part of an elaborately organized
attack on socialism, and they went on to speculate on its
motives. They insisted on digging up the root that grew deep
underneath it. This attack clearly focused on Beijing Mayor
Peng and the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist
Party. Everyone understood that the newspapers were the voice
of the Party, so they were shocked to read this attack on a part
of the Party. Once again, there was no way for the Chinese
people to know what was going on behind the scenes.
The newspapers told us what the Party liked or disliked,
but it was never their intent to tell us the truth or the facts. That
was never seen as their purpose We were perplexed and
shocked to see Marshall Peng (who was China’s Supreme
Commander in the Korean War), the Mayor of Beijing,
Vice-Mayor Wu, and a number of other senior government
officials, suddenly turned into anti-Communists and counterrevolutionaries
in rapid succession by the Party newspapers.
The melodies of the Cultural Revolution seemed strangely
discordant to most of our ears. What we had worked for nearly
two decades to build in China, now seemed suddenly poised
against itself and us. What was even more incredible, was that
impulsive, inexperienced teenagers would be the ones
encouraged to lead the charge of this new senseless revolution
against local officials and intellectuals. Such a devastating
political explosion in a great nation with more than 5000 years
of civilization shocked people all over the world as it’s bizarre
direction became clearer day by day.
A few months later, the May 16th Notification, a notice
of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and
formulated by Mao himself, was published by the Central
Political Bureau on that day in 1966. This notice gave us a
glimpse of the mysterious motives behind the growing confusion
of the new Cultural Revolution. “The representatives of the
bourgeoisie who have sneaked into our Party, government,
armies, and cultural circles, are a group of counter-revolutionaries
and revisionists. Once the conditions are ripe they intend
to seize political power and change the proletarian dictatorship
into a bourgeoisie dictatorship. Some of them have been seen
through and some of them have not. Some of them have been
trusted and fostered as our successors, for instance, the
characters of the type such as Kruschev. They are sleeping at
our side. Party Committees at all levels must pay full attention
to this.”
Then, the June 1st edition of the People’s Daily
contained a big character poster written by seven people
headed by Nie Yuanzi, the secretary of the Party Committee in
the Philosophy Department of Beijing University. The poster
strongly criticized the leading member of the Party in Beijing
University. It charged that he had “sabotaged the Cultural
Revolution.”
An editorial in the People’s Daily that same day, pointed
out, “A violent storm of Cultural Revolution has already surged
into being within our country!” And it added that it would soon
“sweep away everything” before it. On that same day Mao
ordered Nie’s poster publicly broadcast. It lit a blazing fire in
Beijing University that soon spread throughout the entire
country. On June 2nd, the People’s Daily published Nie’s poster
on the front page with the caption, “A big character poster by
seven comrades from Beijing University shows us a great
conspiracy.” The Commentator, in his article, then accused the
Party Committee at Beijing University of being an anti-Party
clique. He then called on revolutionaries to place themselves
under the leadership of the Party’s Central Committee, headed
by Chairman Mao himself, to “fight resolutely against those
black gangs going against the Party leadership.” No matter
what banners they held or what their status or seniority, they
were to be smashed completely.
Mao’s words, for he was the Commentator, backed by his
extraordinary prestige and influence, plus the inciting
admonitions of the People’s Daily, sent people all over the
country into sudden action. The results of these words were
sensational and exciting. Nie became a heroine in one day. All
universities and colleges followed the example of Beijing
University. Like an immitating wave, they drug out the first and
second rank leadership of the Party committees within their
schools too. Big character posters sprang up everywhere and the
nation’s educational order was totally disrupted.
Our school, in the heart of Beijing, was once again full of
big character posters, and there was no doubt that the first rank
level of the Party’s committee in the school was the designated
target. How could ordinary people tell the truth from falsehood
in these posters or newspapers? Since we had no legal system
to check the power of the Party or to proclaim truth, those in
power could make somebody guilty of whatever they wished,
whenever they wished. It was exactly as in the old Chinese
saying, “Give a dog a bad name and then hang him.” As I
looked at these incredible charges, I took all of these posters as
fictitious stories and curiosities. Yet, given the increasing
tensions growing all around me, I also tried to learn something
from them.
Later it became obvious, that even the Chairman of
China, Liu Shao-qi, was unaware of Mao’s true intentions when
he launched his Cultural Revolution. As a responsible
government official, he sent working groups to the schools to
control the revolution by establishing and maintaining order.
Mao himself originally agreed to these steps. As a result, these
working groups took the place of the local Party committees. It
was their function to lead the cultural revolution according to
the Eight Articles set down by the Central Committee of the
Party. Among other things, these Articles directed: “No big
character posters on the streets,” “Handle problems differently
at home than abroad, inside and outside a unity,” “Hold a
meeting inside the campus, but not outside,” “Don’t have
denouncing meetings on a large scale,” and so on.
However, the students, with Mao’s support, took these
official restrictions as efforts to suppress their revolution.
Therefore, once again with Mao’s support, they began to drive
the new working groups out of the schools shortly after they
were established. Quite a number of people, including many in
the working groups themselves, originally thought that those
who were against the Party working groups must, therefore, be
anti-Party. As the days passed the swarm of contradictions and
paradoxes increased and intensified, until eventually hostility
toward the working groups broke out with the ferocity of an
erupting volcano. The students at Beijing Post and
Telecommunications College were the first to drive their
working group from their school. Then, one by one, without
exception, the students at other schools did the same.
Up until this time, I had formed a good impression of the
head of our college’s working group, Mr. Chao. He appeared to
be a pleasant and reasonable army man. I sympathized with
him, for as an army man he was duty bound to carry out all
orders given to him by a higher authority. But he too, was soon
driven from his post in confusion and disgrace.
As the days passed, more and more of the population
tried hard to figure out Mao’s real intentions, for everyone
wanted to follow them correctly. Yet there were others, like the
Gang of Four, who tried hard to figure out Mao’s intentions, just
to take advantage of the situation and to fish in the troubled
waters. Of course there have always been people of that type,
and there always will be too!
We even had a couple in our school who proved to be a
prime example of this opportunistic side of human nature. I refer
to them as a couple, not because they were lovers, but because
they often echoed one another’s opinions. From the beginning
they played their roles as if they were in an elaborately staged
drama. A drama which required some very mean and ugly roles.
They understood their leader’s taste quite well, and tried to
impress him accordingly with how deeply their proletarian
convictions ran, and how very faithful they were to the Party.
To all who would listen, they loudly proclaimed their
convictions as revolutionaries and leftists. Therefore, on many
occasions they worked hard to participate in the center of the
action, on the Cultural Revolution side, of course.
Not long into the Cultural Revolution, the whole school
was about to go to Beijing University to view the big character
posters displayed there. Before we ever left our campus, these
two stepped out of ranks, struck a pose, and with forced anger
shouted in chorus: “Wu Jieqin, get out of the rank! Zhang Di,
get out! Guan Tian, get out!” We were told that we were not fit
and therefore not allowed, to see the revolutionary big character
posters. Then, a few days later, at a movie party on campus,
celebrating August 1st Day, the day the Chinese Red Army was
founded, these same two got up and told us that we had no right
to sit with the revolutionary masses. At meetings organized to
criticize and struggle against “the enemy” they would almost
always be the first to open fire, sometimes dominating the
entire meeting.
Their usual procedure was for one of them to stand up
and shout, “Wu!”, or some other victim’s name. Then, as if his
indignation was not expressed strongly enough, he would then
follow by banging his fist on the desk, often causing the glasses
or cups to shake frightfully. Then he might take out a notebook,
actually a diary, turn to the required page, and read aloud the
poison he had written there. Often he read that his victim on a
particular day and at a particular place had said something
counter revolutionary to someone. For instance, he might read
that his victim had once talked with someone saying that
“people are equal in front of the truth.” Then he might shout
even louder, “People like you will never be allowed to be equal
according to the truth! What did you mean? What did you want
to do? Confess! You must be well-behaved!”
Neither one of them ever seemed to realize that this
show perfectly revealed their true colors. This was exactly the
behavior expected of a spy who was attempting to record what
he thought might be useful later against his colleagues. They
went so far, and were so emotional, that their evil quality even
knotted the muscles and blood vessels in their faces. Their five
sense organs could hardly play a healthy positive role in their
lives any longer. They had become victims of their own deceit.
They thought nothing of making others suffer, or even die, if
only it served their personal needs to be successful in their
game of power.
On August 5th, Mao’s big character poster, “Bombard the
Headquarters—One of My Big Character Posters,” appeared in
the government Center of the Chinese Communist Party, the
Zhongnanhai. It was later published in newspapers across the
country. One article in the People’s Daily read, “How splendid
is this first big character poster of Marxism-Leninism in our
country!”
The newspaper commentary went on to stress, “In the
past two months, some leading comrades from the Center, as
well as from local groups, acted in contradiction by practicing a
bourgeois dictatorship based upon bourgeois principles. They
knocked down the Cultural Revolution on a grand and
spectacular scale. They confounded black and white, and
confused right and wrong. They surrounded and annihilated
revolutionary factors, and suppressed all challenging voices.
They carried out white terror. With stars in their eyes, they
boosted the arrogance of the bourgeois and deflated the morale
of the proletariat. How cruel this had been.”
From that moment on it became obvious that the
situation was becoming very serious, and there was no doubt
that this revolution would be long term and nation wide. What
puzzled many of us, and what we asked was, “Where was the
bourgeois headquarters and who was at its head?” We could not
imagine that Liu, our nation’s number two man, was the target
of this insanity. Then, several days later we saw our national
leaders listed in a new and mysterious order: Mao, Lin Biao,
Zhou Enlai, Tao Zhu, Chen Boda, Deng Xiaoping, Kang Sheng,
and then Liu. Liu moved from the second in command, to the
eighth! This was the first we learned that something sinister
had happened amongst our national leaders.
Five days after Mao’s poster was published, I talked with
a school friend who had just returned from a reception given by
the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party,
celebrating the 16 Decisions of the Revolution. He told me that
Mao, completely unexpectedly, appeared suddenly like a
phantom before those present. Since Mao had assumed the
status of a god in the hearts of the Chinese people, their blood
surged when they heard Mao speak to them. He would say,
“You should pay attention to the affairs of our nation and carry
out the Cultural Revolution to the end.” Tears rolled down their
faces. They stretched out their hands to touch Mao’s holy body.
Words were inadequate for my friend to describe the scene he
saw and the effect it had on the peoples’ spirits. It demonstrated
how Mao’s status had soared in the hearts of the Chinese
people. Mao’s thoughts, and his person, had actually become
deified, like some ancient emperor god from our past. The
people’s worship of him seemed unshakable. It was this blind
veneration that become one of the major causes of the most
horrible tragedy of our five thousand year history, the Cultural
Revolution.
As all logic and reason seemed to evaporate into a frenzy
of Mao worship, we suddenly found ourselves living in the hour
of the Red Guards. These young fighters of the Cultural
Revolution were first formed in the middle school attached to
Qing Hua University and were directly supported by Mao
himself. Like a prairie fire, such groups soon spread throughout
China. I encountered them first on our own campus. It was the
end of July and we were having a quiet supper in our canteen.
Suddenly, a stirring ear-piercing voice that we had never heard
before came over the loudspeaker. It was an unknown boy’s
voice full of belligerence. It made its point with an antithetical
couplet: “If the father is a hero, the son must be a brave man. If
the father is a reactionary, the son must be born a son of a bitch!”
We soon learned they had given their new campaign the
title, The Devil Will Be Depressed When He Sees It. Suddenly,
out of nowhere, groups of young Red Guards, from various
middle schools, assumed an aggressive air on our campus
advocating and arguing strongly here and there with those who
disagreed with their couplets. I wondered how this could have
all come about, for it was all so clearly preposterous. It had
become a study in living surrealism. A truly upside down world
ruled by adolescents. As I looked around me, most of these Red
Guards were disturbingly young, naive, and as impressionable
as western adolescents at a rock concert. They all wore
yellow-green second hand army uniforms and caps still blazed
with Mao’s famous red star on the front. Their main insignia
was a big red arm band printed with the three Chinese
characters meaning Red Guard.
If we felt compelled to argue with them about a couplet
we were first expected to tell them our family background to
prove we were qualified to enter into such a debate. This came
to mean that people of Black Five Classification would not even
be allowed to speak with them about the purpose of their
mission. The Black Five referred to landlord, rich peasant,
counter revolutionary, evil element, and Rightist. Upon first
seeing those almost baby-like Red Guards, I went up to them,
without any thought of personal fear, in the attempt to persuade
them that they were wrong. I answered their questions about my
background by saying that I only knew my father was out of
work since I had left home. It was just then that one of my
fellow workers in the library saw what was happening and
caught hold of me and dragged me hastily back to our office.
With concern and urgency in her voice, she said to me, “My
goodness! We worry about you. What would happen if they
were to ever learn of your background? Don’t do that again,
please!” Indeed what she said was true. They might have beat
me to death if they knew that I had dared to debate with them,
having the background that I had. I suddenly felt completely
helpless in any efforts I might have had to aid others in
understanding that the Red Guards were wrong. Completely
wrong!
This Couplet Debate, spread everywhere. First to other
schools in Beijing, then to the far corners of China. As I closely
watched the Red Guards, I saw children who had been well
trained to fiercely argue with people. They were so impulsive
and adamant that it sometimes seemed they would wipe out
anyone who dared to refute the viewpoint of one of their
couplets. It soon became obvious that the Red Guard movement
had become bigger than any of us had dared to imagine. So
fearsome had they become, that few of the population tried to
debate with these young scorpions set loose among us. Any of
those who did dare to raise a question had to be from the Red
Five Classification—worker, peasant, soldier, revolutionary
cadre, or family of martyrs. Even so, they still risked being
charged as traitors, as they often were. I remember one young
student from Beijing Middle School No. 2, who was eventually
tortured to death because he refused to yield to the insanity of
the Red Guards.
As I look back on those frightening days, I remember
with respect Deng Ling, the daughter of Deng Xiaoping, the
man who eventually became our nation’s leader. Most children
of senior cadres were spoiled by the many privileges they
enjoyed. No matter whether they were qualified or not, they
could get everything and anything because of their parents’
power. Many citizens were becoming very resentful of this
abuse of privilege. One morning among these Red Guards, by
our school gate, I was surprised to see Deng Ling arguing with
her sister about the absurdity of a couplet. She had criticized
the couplet strongly and was hurt to tears when, in retaliation,
someone consequently cursed her as a Rightist. During those
years that she was a student in our school, she always dressed
simply and lived a very plain life no different from any other
student. She always maintained this manner of life, even though
her father was on his way to becoming the leader of all China.
From the Red Guards’ first appearance, it was clear they
were destined to be the fighters starring in this revolution that
had no precedent in all of human history. Their oath was, “We
are the guards for our red regime. The Party Central Committee
and Chairman Mao are our patrons. To liberate the whole of
humanity is our duty-bound responsibility. Mao Zedong’s
Thought is the supreme directive of all our actions. We swear,
‘We shall resolutely shed our last drop of blood defending the
Party and our great leader, Chairman Mao!’” They held that,
“A rebel is a revolution,” and “The soul of Mao Zedong’s
Thought is to rebel.” They quoted Mao’s saying, “The myriad of
intricacies of Marxist principles boiled down to one phrase, ‘It
is right to rebel.’” Through this twisted concept of truth, they
had already assumed they were the dominating force of China.
~~~
On August 1st, 1966, Mao wrote in a letter to the Red
Guards at the middle school attached to Qing Hua University,
“Your actions show your just anger and rightful denunciation of
the landlords, revisionists and their lackeys who exploit and
oppress workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, and
revolutionary factions. It is right to rebel against reactionaries. I
express here my warm support...” With this overt support from
Chairman Mao, organizations of Red Guards suddenly sprang
up all over the country like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
In Tien An Men Square, on August 18th, Mao received
Red Guards from all parts of China. I was not allowed to attend,
even though Tien An Men was very near to the Academy, but
the many TV cameras, newspapers, and friends who did attend
told me what happened. Millions of Red Guards gathered in the
square at five in the morning. Mao, in army uniform, reviewed
the Red Guard troops passing through the square. Then he
walked down from Tien An Men Gate Tower shaking hands
with the Red Guards. Tien An Men, highlighted by thousands of
waving red banners, became a sea of people hailing, “Long live
Chairman Mao!” A Red Guard girl from the middle school
attached to Beijing Teachers University came up to Mao and
gave him her Red Guard arm band, and Mao, on the spot,
tacitly approved her as the Commander-in-Chief of all Red
Guards. Her name was Binbin, which means, “urbane” or “not
forceful.” Mao said to her, “We should resort to force, but not
to urbanity.” So she changed her first name to Yaowu, which
means “resort to force.” As the months and years passed, this
petite teenage girl eventually did live up to her new name,
sometimes by even personally torturing her adversaries to death.
In the opening speech of this great rally, the head of the
Central Office for the Cultural Revolution, and member of the
Gang of Four, Chen Boda, called Mao a “great leader, great
teacher, and great helmsman.” Following Chen, Lin Biao said
in his speech that, “In this proletarian Cultural Revolution,
Chairman Mao is our great Commander-in-Chief.” From then on
we had to put up with the endless shouting of the title of these
Four Great’s whenever Mao’s name was subsequently
mentioned. Lin Biao took advantage of this occasion and the
simple-minded, curious, and impulsive young Red Guards. He
called on them to “Go all out to destroy all the old thought, old
culture, old customs, and all old habits of the exploiting
wealthy classes.” These then became the Four Old’s. He also
called on people all over the country to support the proletarian
revolutionary spirit of “dare to break through, dare to act, and
dare to rebel.” Thus was launched the Destroy the Four Old’s
movement on a national scale. It spread all over China with
amazing speed, and it wreaked incredible havoc on 5000 years
of rich and magnificent Chinese civilization.
There were big character posters on the streets the next
day urging everyone to “Declare war on the old world!” They
somehow rationalized as being part of the Old Fours any
modern western and Hong Kong styles of dress, including
high-heeled shoes, jeans, rouge, lipstick, permanent waves and
even long plaits of hair. They cut off high heels and long hair
and cut jeans to pieces wherever they happened to see them.
One day I went to the railway station to meet my sister
as she arrived from Sichuan. As I approached the main gate of
the station, I saw the Red Guards standing by the gate with
scissors in hand. I wondered what those scissors were for until I
saw two young women approaching the gate with their beautiful
long hair cascading down their backs. Immediately, the
revolutionary scissors answered my question. I heard the sound
of the scissors, “Katsa!” and the Four Old's were wiped out
before our eyes. The girls left wordlessly, with their beautiful
hair cut to their ears. However, they were luckier than the next
to approach the gate, a woman with a perm. In only a few
seconds she was left nearly as bald headed as a nun. She too
left wordless, but her tears spoke volumes.
At the end of August, we went to see the big character
posters placed around the sports circle in Xianlongtan Stadium.
When our school bus passed through Qian Men Street, which is
the main street running south of Tian An Men Square, a vast
sheet of red color blinded my eyes. All the shops along the
street were painted red to show they were not old, but brand
new Revolutionary Red! It was absurd how red everything was,
yet no one dared leave his shop in any color other than red,
because red was the color of the revolution. In a few days red
paint was out of stock throughout the city. So illogical had this
charade become, that there was even an attempt to revise our
traffic light signals. Red meant go and green meant stop!
Obviously the results of the short lived expression of Maoist
patriotism were numerous traffic accidents and massive disorder
throughout the land.
All the names of shops, institutes, organizations, schools,
and factories also seemed to be changing to take on new
revolutionary names such as East-is-Red Snack Bar,
Defend-the-East Hospital, Towards-the-Sun Art Association,
Workers-Peasants-Soldiers Restaurant, Ever-Red Middle
School, Four-News Barbershop, and so on. We could hardly tell
one from the other. They all sounded alike. Beijing’s best
known hospital, Union Hospital, opposite our school, was built
in the 1920’s with money from the Rockefeller Foundation. At
its main gate Red Guards had posted, “Long live the
revolutionary rebel spirit!” In front of hundreds of totally
confused onlookers, the Red Guards then took down the “Union
Hospital” sign and put up its new name, “Anti-Imperialism
Hospital.”
~~~
The Red Guards from the Art Middle School, which was
part of our university, rebelled first against the art culture itself!
They went first to the well known art gallery in Liulichang
Street that was famous for its display and sale of traditional
Chinese paintings, calligraphy and antiques. Its name, Yong
Bao Zai, over its main gate was quickly covered up. A new big
character poster was hung over the shop window. It read, “Yong
Bao Zai has been a black store for several decades. It exploited
working people’s sweat and blood, serving the bourgeoisie...
feudalist landlords. It never served socialism or workers,
peasants, and soldiers. It is an exchange for the black gang of
artists. We are now going to strike it to total ruin.”
Not long afterward, we were horrified to learn that Red
Guards from several other schools, stirred up by someone in our
own school, were coming to destroy all of our plaster cast
sculpture models which had been created from the originals of
classical Greece through the Renaissance on to the 19th
century. These very valuable models were stored in our
warehouse and brought out for teaching purposes only. They saw
these sculptures as the dross scum of western civilization,
especially Venus, because she was nude.
Fortunately, all of the Red Guards were not of one mind.
Many did not agree that these models were truly western dross.
However, they understood very clearly how difficult it would be
to stop their fellow teenaged Red Guards, once they were
committed to what they believed and that these beliefs created
pure-crazed action. Even though the inevitable seemed upon us,
we had to try something to avoid the destruction of our valuable
collection. At least we had to attempt to reduce the damage to
a minimum. Finally, as the purge became eminent, we decided
to take the initiative. We decided to receive the outside Red
Guards warmly and show them our enthusiastic support for their
revolutionary deeds. But, before they arrived, we would move
as many as possible of our most valuable models down into the
cellar to be hidden. When the Red Guards arrived, we
explained to the young zealots our need for teaching anatomy
and figure structure to our students, and asked their permission
to keep some of our models for those purposes. We went even
further by suggesting that to properly educate our students in the
values of the Cultural Revolution, we had to retain some
Western models enabling us to properly criticize this form of art
ourselves. Then together with the Red Guards, we carried out
our preselected victims, which were duplicate copies. These we
were ready to sacrifice to the Cultural Revolution in the middle
of our athletic field, the chosen execution ground.
In a line beside these mute victims, stood our older
professors. All were leading artists in Chinese culture, but were
now caricatured as masters of intimidation. They were labelled
as reactionary authoritative persons of learning. Their heads
were drooped in disbelief as young Red Guards hung label
boards around their necks. The boards read, Black Gang or
Reactionary Authority and so on. The full-sized Venus and
Michelangelo’s Dying Slave seemed to sob in sad sympathy. I
am sure they never expected to be executed so cruelly in this
culture rich in 5,000 years of art. And what did it mean for a
slave to be executed by a party of workers and peasants? With
people crowded around this spectacle, Li, the one who led the
Red Guards from outside our school, screamed himself hoarse,
accusing those mute enemies, Venus, Moses, the Slave... and
those poor old master professors. To everyone who had the
ability to listen, he shouted his story of how he was a victim of
these statues.
When he finished, the young crowd went into action.
Within minutes they had broken the statues from far off France
into hundreds of pieces and harnessed the remnants around the
necks of all those old professors, and threw the wooden bases
into a blazing fire. It created an erie scene, a type of sacrificial
rite. When the fire slowly died down, the old professors were
escorted back to their special dwelling labeled Niupeng,
meaning cowshed, as if they were some ominous monsters or
demons.
Finally, the Red Guards left shouting triumphantly,
“We’ll burn your library the next time we come!” Those of us
who worked in the library became anxious for the safety of all
the knowledge placed in our keeping. In desperation, we soon
built a brick wall around the windows to prevent anything
inflammatory from being thrown in from outside. We put up
slogans such as, “We should take care of our State’s property!”
and “Protecting our cultural heritage is our duty!” Then we
picked out all the duplicate copies of the libraries cherished
titles, together with any damaged books, and piled them up as a
potential sacrifice to await the Red Guards’ threat of eminent
return. We continued to wait through the coming months, but
fortunately this Red Guard faction never did return. No one
knew why. Their hands must have been too busy purifying the
rest of Beijing.
It was during this period of chaos that Lin Biao said in an
enlarged session of the Central Political Bureau that, “the basic
problem of revolution is the problem of political power. Once
the proletariat, the working people, have the power, they will
have everything. If they do not, they will lose everything... when
the proletariat seizes political power, the millionaires and
billionaires can be smashed at once and the proletariat will
have everything.” Then, the Minister of Public Security said in
an expanded session of the Beijing Public Security Bureau,
“Whatever rules we have provided, even from the public
security organizations or the state, don’t be bound by them... If
people beat someone to death, I don’t agree, but people should
hate with all their soul the bad ones among us. So use force if
you can’t dissuade.” One can see from these statements that the
beating, the killing, the searching of people’s homes, and the
confiscation of their property, all of it, all across the country,
came from above. People suffered everywhere and our local
leaders were paralyzed to do anything about it.
One afternoon, as I was walking in the Dongdan district, I
heard a group of Red Guards shouting as they sped past me on
their bikes. On every bike there was a red flag. Each of these
young teenagers looked as if they had all donned their parents’
old army uniforms. In their baggy official attire they had
become China’s new army. In this bellicose atmosphere, I saw
an almost nude, fat, yet muscular man of about forty on the
back of a pedicab under escort by members of this teenage
army. The man’s eyes were closed and he looked exhausted.
The rope binding him was so tight that it bit into his flesh and
bruised it here and there. Sitting by his feet was a boy about
eight, huddled tightly against his father. Where were they
taking them? Who was this man? Was he one of the Black
Five, a dissident, or a war prisoner? The poor child was so
frightened that the sight of him made my heart ache.
Standing there in a daze, I just couldn’t understand what
this hysteria was all about. Was this the revolution referred to
by Mao as, “A great revolution that touched people to their
innermost being?” People were beaten bloody while their
attackers shouted a quotation from Mao supporting their cruel
righteousness, “Revolution is not a matter of entertaining
guests, not a matter of doing embroidery, not a matter of writing
an article. Revolution is rebellion, a violent action.”
A terrible example of this teen violence let loose upon us
by our leader was an incident in which more than three
hundred, so-called black elements were killed at Daxin in
Beijing. The oldest among these elements, was eighty years,
while the age of the youngest traitor was only thirty-eight days.
What was that inhuman world that had become China! Of the
twenty-two families these young guards decided to punish, there
was not a single soul left alive after the bloody slaughter.
These were special Public events organized for
punishment. Some of these horribly bloody scenes were even
held in public theaters. From outside, we couldn’t bear to hear
the screams of those who were chosen for punishment within.
Not all were fortunate enough to get out of these places of
punishment alive. To show that the revolution was indeed a
violent action and meant to suppress any resistance that might
appear, they went on to established armed pickets. “Kill
without appeal” was their circular order. Taking these orders
literally, they set themselves up as reforming through labor
criminal courts, torturing and killing the innocent. The picket
members were from the families of cadres and army men, many
of them children of senior cadres. They had long accepted that
they themselves were zilaihong, innately revolutionary. This
naturally made them feel far superior to everyone else.
One morning, in the later days of the revolution, I visited
a middle school in Beijing that had set up such a criminal
court. Whoever had been brought there as a member of the
newly expanded Black Nine, or who even just had a different
point of view from their accusers, would be dragged into this
court and made to suffer all kinds of tortures, with such
picturesque names as kneeling on hot cinders, paint face with
paints, hanging test , sonorous kowtow, imitating an airplane,
burning hair, target practice, piercing through, and so on. The
pickets often carried banners with a theme slogan, “Long live
the Red Horror!” I also saw these same characters written on
the wall in their court room that day. But here these characters
were written in the blood of their victims. As I looked at these
ghastly traces of human blood dripping from the characters on
the wall, I felt the terror that was sweeping through our great
land. As I stood there in a sickened terror, it was as if my hair
was standing up in horror, knowing that my life was deemed
just as expendable by those young teenagers.
A graduate of this same middle school, Wu, had been
beaten to death because he had objected to that notorious
notion of blood lineage, which stated that if you were
descended from a landlord, you were as villainous as the worst
landlord in history. A retired worker over eighty, who had
worked in this school his whole life, was falsely charged as a
remnant of counter-revolution and then severely beaten. Then to
complete their task, they doused him with boiling water and
then whipped him with belts until he finally died. In our school
the Red Guards also beat some teachers, especially the older
ones, using leather belts with brass heads and with metal rods
to break their ribs. Those professors labelled Black Elements
were forced to do manual labor every day, regardless of their
physical condition. They were subjected to the cruelest public
criticism at any time and at any place the Red Guards chose.
One day, one of the best known artists in China, Ye, was
stopped by a young Red Guard as he labored on campus. Ye
was then denounced fiercely, then his head was lashed with a
belt until bloody. When the Red Guard finally left, Ye went to
the clinic for treatment, and then, in fear, quickly returned to
continue his assigned labor.
Many homes of the Black Nine were searched and their
private property confiscated for unknown reasons, to be given to
unknown people, to be used for unknown purposes. They took
all that they considered proof of one’s guilt or associated with
bourgeois decadence. Under the pretence of revolutionary
righteousness some also took valuables. A photo with a foreign
friend might lead to a charge of having illegal relations with a
foreign country or being a spy. Professor Chang’s diary kept
from the time he lived on his farm, caused him to be accused of
keeping a biantianzhang. This was considered to be a record of
loans, former land holdings, and confiscated property which
were secretly kept by a member of the overthrown classes who
were still dreaming of a return to power. He tried to defend
himself, but as in all defenses, it was in vain. The stronger your
efforts to defend yourself, the stronger their efforts to make you
suffer. They eventually forced him to confess, but in so doing he
suffered to the limits of his physical endurance.
I was much luckier. In 1951, 1955, and again in 1957,
most of my personal effects which would be likely to arouse
suspicion, particularly my photos taken in the United States,
were confiscated from me. I had sold my Smith&Wesson
revolver when I needed money in Shanghai early in 1949.
Otherwise I definitely would have still had it with me, since
shooting was one of my hobbies and I had never anticipated
what would happen if I were caught with a gun under the
Communist regime. I later learned that the most common
punishment for such a crime was to be beaten to death on the
spot by these young Guards. So, knowing the consequences, I
checked everything I had at home and threw some souvenir
American coins—pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters—plus
my air force dog-tags into a nearby pond. I wonder what
archaeologists will think a thousand years from now when they
find these coins and dog-tags. “How did all these come to this
part of the Chinese countryside so far from their home? Why
were they all on the bottom of this little pond? There was no
war between these two countries here.”
As I expected, they finally searched my home while I
was detained by one of the Red Guard organizations in our
school. The only thing they took was a photo of my eldest
brother in Taiwan, Wu Feng. This they thought proved that my
family’s background was reactionary. Anyone who was
determined to be from the families of former landlords were
sent by train back to their own countryside immediately after
their houses were searched and the incriminating evidence was
confiscated. At the train station, when they went through the
underground passage to the railway platform, those who were to
be shipped out were fiercely beaten by Red Guards who lined
both sides of the passage. Some fell to the cold concrete floor,
unconscious from the severe beating. The world famous writer,
Lao She, author of the great play Tea House, then an old man
of 70, could not stand the thought of continuing under such
tortures and drowned himself in the lake where I once worked
breaking ice, before they could take him away. Many famous
masters of literature and the arts, like Lao She, ended their
lives rather than endure such cruel persecution.
Many years later, after the Gang of Four was smashed,
and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were over, a former
schoolmate came from Shanghai and happened to meet me at
our school gate. He rushed over to me and hugged me tight,
crying, “My dear old Lao Wu, you are still alive. We thought
you were no doubt killed during those years.” Yes, as I thought
back on all that happened, I would have been dead if I were not
in Beijing. Especially if I had not been able to make my way
back to my own school, I would have never been able to escape
by sheer luck alone. But here in our school, my case had
cleared just in time. I had already paid for my sins through
years of imprisonment, and I was now in a position of little
importance. I was as controlled as a bird in a cage. Being caged
after those previously long years of imprisonment made me
suffer deeply, that is true, but at least I survived. The new
revolutionary forces were not very interested in me as a result.
It seemed their hands were too full persecuting others more
important than I who had not yet paid for their sins. Thus I
survived.
~~~
Many party leaders in other parts of China tried to stop
this uncontrolled violence in their areas, thinking that this was
not the right way to carry out a cultural revolution. The Red
Guards then met this official resistance by lodging formal
complaints against the regional leadership. Supported by Mao,
the Office of the Cultural Revolution, and the majority of their
fellow students, the Red Guards in Beijing began to establish
ties with students in other cities nationwide. They called it the
Great Contact. They would then travel around the country with
free transportation, board and lodging.
Soon our school auditorium, dining room, and classrooms
were full of Red Guards from all parts of China, most of them
looking very young and innocent, like baby students. Red
Guards from Beijing who went to other cities were considered
special just because they were from the capital, the place
where Mao lived. They were now suddenly free to carry their
revolutionary experiences, technics, and excesses to other
cities. The results were that the Red Guards from other cities
followed blindly whatever atrocities the Red Guards of Beijing
committed.
One day a big character poster appeared on the streets
that attempted to convince the public that the heads of the
reactionary bourgeoisie and the commanders of the bourgeoisie
headquarters who were attempting to overthrow the party of the
people were none other than the Chairman of China, Liu
Shaogi, along with Deng Xiaoping. I, like everyone else, was
totally shocked by such a notion. I slowly begin to realize that
this was a totally different kind of revolution from any that
China had experienced in the past. It was special because no
one, not even our leaders inside the red walls of Beijing’s
Zhongnanhai, the heart of China, knew what was really going
on, what would happen next, and where it would end. If these
leaders knew so little, how could the common people of China
be able to tell truth from falsehood in the affairs of our nation?
There was no way to know the inside stories, the true stories.
The newspapers, our only media, could only say what the
people in control wanted said at that time.
The organizations of public security, the procurate and
the courts were totally paralyzed. The Central Committee of the
Cultural Revolution had long since fallen into the hands of the
Gang of Four, and their personal directives were now, in fact,
our laws. The Red Guards were the executors. These rulers
alone were to decide everything, but that was logistically
impossible. Inevitably there would be conspiracies and tricks. It
was the same old story, thousands of years old. Treacherous
court officials would eventually seize power, then those loyal to
the sovereign would be murdered. The Gang of Four knew
history’s script very well. They used it to realize their own wild
ambitions, by taking full advantage of this chaotic revolution.
Step by step they had been favored and trusted by Mao, the
Supreme God of China. Of primary importance, they needed to
sweep aside all barriers against the realization of their personal
motives and ambitions. They made use of the naive innocence
of the young Red Guards’ blind faith in the Party and in the
person of Mao, their god. One after another of the senior cadres,
old marshals, and even founders of the People’s Republic itself
were persecuted to death. Their operating policy was the same
as I had experienced in 1957, “Give a dog a bad name and then
hang him!”
Having grown up in a movie family, I had watched Jiang
Qing, who was a movie actress before she went to Yanan to
join with the PLA. Now, she was dreaming of becoming the
Queen of the Red Capital, Beijing. I knew that she had run from
Shanghai to the Northwest and had become Mao’s wife, and
that seemed to indicate that she must have something very
special. However, she was still relatively unknown to the
people. But her words and deeds as the revolution wore on, put
more and more worry into their hearts. I was surprised when
years later, as the tempest of the Cultural Revolution
developed, she suddenly began to appear on more and more
important occasions. I never could understand why or how all of
our country’s senior leaders, with their long and rich
experiences of revolution, having met and survived so many
severe tests, suddenly found themselves under her control. How
did she come to such power? Why had no one sensed the
danger and stopped her? My final thought was always, if Mao
said “No!” she would be nothing. So why did he never say,
“Enough!”?
She persecuted to the death all who knew her dirty and
sordid past. After the Gang of Four had been smashed, I
happened to meet a well known movie director’s wife, Mrs.
Zheng, in a friend’s home. She was sobbing bitterly while
telling me the story of her husband’s death at the hands of Jiang
Qing. It was late one night in Shanghai. Suddenly, some
mysterious people forced their way into their home. The
intruders did not identify themselves, but they rummaged
through chests and cupboards. Every inch of space was
searched, and they took away all that they wanted. Her husband
was also taken away, never to come back again until after his
death. All of this it seemed, because he had been a close friend
of Jiang Qing while they were at a movie studio during the
1930’s. Mrs. Zheng said there was private and very personal
information in at least one letter Jiang Qing had sent her
husband. Years later she killed him to keep her dirty record a
secret.
Since everyone saw the purpose of the Cultural
Revolution from a different perspective, each person naturally
had a different point of view as to what it really was and what it
was meant to accomplish. Therefore, the many young
participants found themselves divided into numerous
confronting factions, each an independent Combat Team within
the Red Guards and with a different perspective. As the Cultural
Revolution developed in Beijing, the central conflict there
developed between two large groups, or Combat Teams, calling
themselves the Loyalists and the Proletarian Rebels. This type
of internal struggle, running throughout the entire Cultural
Revolution and across all of China, added even greater chaos.
In January, 1967, Mao made a command, “We’ll seize
back the power from those who take the Capitalist road.” The
Red Guards in Shanghai took the first action in response to
Mao’s words. They seized power from the Shanghai Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party. Almost immediately this
storm of power seizing swept all across the entire country,
regardless of whether the individual leadership was right or
wrong. If a Red Guard didn’t join the most radical movement he
was labelled as part of a Loyalist faction, and not part of the
Patriotic Rebel faction. Hostilities between the two factions
ultimately broke out into armed conflict. Each faction tried to
seize from the other the nation’s seal of power by force of arms,
thinking this would give them a substantial lasting power. Even
families were divided, putting father against son and mother
against daughter. Relations throughout the country were as
tense as if between enemies on a battlefield. It was almost as
though we were on the brink of another civil war.
School was suspended everywhere. Every empty space on
the walls of this many-walled city, and on every other open
place in our schools and streets, were filled with big character
posters. The city itself had become a wide open propaganda
battlefield for this bizarre revolution. Everywhere it had become
a youthful civil war filled with ignorance. Each side asserted
that they were the real rebels under the leadership of Mao. But
God only knew which side was telling the truth. I wondered to
myself as I read the posters, how could all those marshals, and
senior revolutionaries, who for decades had been held in such
high esteem by the Chinese people, suddenly turn into hidden
traitors, renegades, warlords, and even bandits? How on earth
had all of these things happened? How did they get away with
it?
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.
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.
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