Since childhood, I like to watch war movies, there is a new movie out, the first thing my friends ask is “fight or not?” Those shots of fighting and killing in the movie always make people’s blood boil. Often imagine themselves on the battlefield like those combat heroes holding a machine gun, clattering to destroy the enemy, even in my dreams. I am not the only one, most boys are like this, but girls rarely have this kind of martial arts complex, the reason is probably only psychologists and physiologists can explain.
The first time I saw martial arts fighting during the Cultural Revolution was at the Ministry of Education, when I was a senior at Erlong Road School in Beijing. That night, students from Beijing Normal University and Peking University went to the Ministry of Education to seize power, and the students from the two schools engaged in a martial arts fight. The tall and fierce students from Beijing Normal University threw two students from Peking University out of a window, but fortunately it was the first floor and no one was killed. Both factions claim to be carrying out Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line and want to take over the power of the Ministry of Education, but I don’t understand what is right or wrong. A male sophomore at our school was a strong supporter of Peking University, and when it became clear that Peking University was unable to defeat Beishi University and withdrew in disgrace, he said that Peking University was withdrawing in a high profile.
I heard about martial arts fights in universities from time to time. The other day, Xu Zengwu, the oldest son of my aunt’s family who was a junior in Beijing Foreign Language Institute, came to my house, and he was hit in the mouth with a softball bat by another faction in school, knocking out his incisors, and my heart throbbed with how much it hurt.
I heard that there was a martial arts fight at Tsinghua University and I ran to watch the fun. The wife of the President was dressed in a cheongsam, wearing a necklace made of ping-pong balls and a Western-style sun hat, and was humiliated, and was accompanied by Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Luo Ruiqing, Jiang Nanxiang and other gangsters.
Tsinghua University is divided into two factions, one is the “regiment faction” led by Kuai Dafu, and the other is the “April 14” faction. The former meeting place was now a battlefield, and the windows of the original school building were bricked up, leaving only small observation holes. Some people from the regiment faction were attacking a building occupied by April 14, all wearing construction site helmets and carrying spears. There was a giant catapult on the roof of the building, and the two two or three meter high cedars used on the building were erected as the two arms of the catapult, with a long rubber band with a leather pocket-like thing, and in the pocket were some broken stones and broken iron pieces, and several people pulled the leather pocket wrapped with iron and stone pieces, and pulled the rubber band to a long length, and let go violently, and the stones and iron pieces shot out like shrapnel. We are far away, there are also iron blocks hit over, I picked up a shape from the ground like a bullet iron things, I do not know what it is, take home to my big brother to see, he said this is to do metal material tensile test specimens.
After a burst of “gunfire”, a group of people rushed out from the four big buildings, holding spears and sticks, wearing helmets and shouting, and rushed towards the regiment, who retreated. Others pointed out that the one who rushed ahead was the head of the 4-1-4, Chen Chusan, who had long heard that Chen Chusan was the son of the early revolutionary Chen Tanqiu, and only this time did he get to see his face. Who wins and who loses is no longer important, I think it is very enjoyable to look at such a situation.
I think it was very enjoyable when we went to Chengdu to see the martial arts fights. We had heard that Chengdu was a great place for martial arts, so we planned to go to Chengdu to see it. At that time, the Great Cascade had come to an end, and the central government issued a notice asking all students in the field to go back to school to start a revolution, and all students in the field could receive tickets to return to their schools with their student cards or Red Guard cards.
The mother of a girl named Dai was in charge of receiving the Red Guards in Beijing at the Ministry of Labor, and she was able to get train tickets to the field. That day she said she had gotten some train tickets to Chengdu, and it was planned that I would go with a boy, Xu Cheng, and Dai and another girl, Cao Beihong, and four of us would go together.
In those days, the school organized us to go to the countryside to help harvest wheat, and we used this as an excuse to ask our families for money and food stamps. It took almost 36 hours from Beijing to Chengdu, and the train was heading west. When the train arrived in Xianyang, a vendor sold me a box of rice on the platform for a very cheap price.
When we were in Beijing, we were told that we could stay in Chengdu’s 16th Middle School, which was the stronghold of the 826 faction, and that we could stay there if we said we were from the Beijing 4-3 faction. When we arrived at the 16th Middle School, we told them that we were from the Beijing 4-3 faction and came to support them in their revolution, and the school agreed to let us live there. We lived in a classroom, and we could sleep on a mat. There was a window in the school that sold food to the students, and the food was good and cheap.
As we wandered around the city, there were slogans and leader quotes everywhere with the smell of gunpowder, “Down with,” “Fire with,” “Smash with,” “Blood with The most popular words were “Down with,” “Burn,” “Smash,” and “Bloodbath. The most popular quotes were “Make up your mind, don’t be afraid to sacrifice, overcome all difficulties, and go for victory”, and there was a quotation from Lin Biao that had not been seen before, “Be brave enough to sacrifice when sacrifice is needed, including sacrificing yourself. It’s over when it’s over, go to war, and when the gun goes off, I’ll die on the battlefield today”.
Chengdu is mainly divided into three factions, a faction called “eight twenty-six”, the head is a female student of Sichuan University, Jiang Haiyun, because of a particularly small, only a few meters, people send the nickname root number 2, the faction of people respect her Jiang political commissar; a faction is “red into”, the full name is the Red Guard The other faction is the “Industrial Army”, the full name of which is the Chengdu Industrial Workers Combat Army. The Industrial Army had been declared a conservative organization by the central government, and I feel that it was a bit like the Linkage in Beijing, which was rejected by the Central Cultural Revolution Group, but still had a lot of power. The difference is that the Linkage is composed of middle school students, while the Industrial Army is composed of industrial workers.
The factions did not give way to each other, and there were often armed fights. The base of the Industrial Army was Factory 132, a mega factory that produced military aircraft, where my uncle worked. Shortly afterwards, a tragedy occurred there that shocked the whole country. The Industrial Army shot at the crowd with machine guns and killed more than 40 people, one of whom was Li Quanhua, the representative of Beijing Geological Institute in Chengdu.
One of them was Li Quanhua, the representative of the Beijing Institute of Geology in Chengdu. We were staying with a student from Beijing University who was an admirer of Guevara. Carrying a military satchel, he got a broken bicycle from somewhere and ran around alone. He often came back with news of the outside world, such as another serious armed struggle in a place called Tuqiao. One day he came back, bruised and swollen, and said he had been beaten up by the Red Sung faction, and his bicycle had been taken away.
There was an air of violence in the society, and the 16th Form was preparing for war. They brought in a staff officer from the air force unit to help set up fortifications. A long wooden podium was placed diagonally at the staircase of the school building, leaving an opening for people to enter and exit, with a mechanism on top that would allow the several hundred pound podium to slide down whenever needed, sealing the staircase and perhaps squeezing the incoming people to death.
That day, the sixteenth school received a war letter from Hong Cheng, the war letter said that tonight at six o’clock to launch an attack on the sixteenth school.
The school had a school-run factory that produced basketball frames, and the entrance to the school was filled with finished and semi-finished basketball frames, forming a temporary fortification.
At 6:00 p.m., the “enemy” arrived as promised, and a large car converted into a radio car shouted through a loud speaker to the school that you were surrounded and should surrender now. The students said that the school was indeed surrounded, and that the composition of the people in Hongcheng was complicated, including students, workers and citizens, some said there were thousands of people outside, and some said there were two thousand. Then, the radio car turned around and began to hit the iron gate with its buttocks, hitting it harder than the other, and the radio car’s buttocks were smashed but not broken.
The rocks from the outside and inside started throwing stones at each other, and the rocks from the outside came in like raindrops, and we threw stones from the inside of the school to the outside, the male students were in charge of throwing, and the female students searched everywhere for stones to provide us with “ammunition”. A student next to me received a stone to the head and immediately fell to the ground. I saw his face full of blood and was carried away.
It was already dark, but the school was not lost. What I didn’t expect was that there was a channel for dialogue between the two warring sides, and the other side said that the wounded were allowed to be taken to the hospital out of revolutionary humanitarianism. At that time, the situation changed abruptly, the back of the school was separated by a wall from the stomatological hospital, which at that time was a military-controlled unit and was not accessible to the general public, and the school was defenseless. That row of rooms is the school’s warehouse, broadcasting equipment and other materials are there.
The head of the school Red Guard had an emergency meeting and organized a death squad, led by the Red Guard’s logistics minister, naked and armed with a machete, to kill the row of rooms and snatched back, snatched back the rooms, but not the supplies in the rooms, and the logistics minister was cut several times and was hospitalized.
In the second half of the night, the PLA troops came and forcibly separated the two factions, an armed struggle was over.
The next day, seeing the school in a mess, thinking of the students who received a stone on the head last night, rubbing their sore and painful shoulders, suddenly felt that the martial arts fighting here is not fun.
Some girls went to the hospital to visit the injured logistics minister, Cao Beihong also went. It was a time of hero worship, and it must have been nice to imagine the logistics minister lad, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by a group of girls and flowers, right? Hopefully, he would not be left with a disability.
The sixteenth grade returned to peace, and the community was still at war.
I should go see my uncle. My uncle has no children, my family has many children, my youngest sister Yanxia was adopted to my uncle when she was 3 years old.
My uncle worked in the infrastructure department of Factory 132, and my aunt was a Russian translator, but after the Sino-Soviet war, she had nothing to do and was assigned to work in the product inspection department.
Factory 132 was located in a place called Huangtianba in the suburbs of Chengdu, more than 20 miles from the city. The original bus service had stopped running long ago, so I had to walk. Not far from Huangtianba, I was stopped by someone. There was a truck on the road and some men with pikes, dressed exactly like the Red Guards in the movies “Hong Hu Red Guards” and “Tide of Fury”, with cloths wrapped around their heads and wearing straw shoes. I said I wanted to go to my uncle’s house, but the man said that the factory is fighting, for your safety, can not go over, I had no choice but to return.
The next day I went again in the drizzle, and there was no one to stop me. When I arrived at the factory’s family area, there were hundreds of family buildings, and my uncle lived in more than 300 of them, so I couldn’t find them for a while, and the streets were empty. There was a police station in front of me, so I thought it would be a good idea. I entered the police station, no one, the doors and windows are open, the table drawers are open, a mess, such a right and wrong place, I quickly withdrew.
Finally arrived at my uncle’s house, it was already noon. The three of them had just finished eating, and there were enough leftovers for me to eat. It seems that his family food is good, there is a small half roast chicken, Yanxia peeled three pine eggs for me, I was swept away. When we first met, my uncle said, “Why are you so old?” At that time I was only 17 years old, I have never looked in the mirror, must be unkempt hair and face strange scary it. Uncle asked me to stay for a few days, I did not stay. When I left, my uncle gave me 15 yuan, and told me that in the future, where the family letter, read it and burn it. I think this must be a lesson learned, I have also heard of many because of private letters or diary to get themselves into trouble.
We decided to go back to Beijing. There was a place in Chengdu where we could get our train tickets, and we queued up with our student IDs. Two students from Chongqing University approached us and tried to make a deal with us. They wanted to go to Beijing and asked us to give them tickets to Beijing and they gave us tickets to Chongqing. They said they should go to Chongqing if they wanted to see the martial fighting, where all kinds of conventional weapons were used, artillery, anti-aircraft machine guns, and even warships were on the field. My aunt’s second son was in college in Chongqing, so my heart moved a little, but then I thought I might not see him, and Xu Cheng and Cao Beihong both wanted to go home, so I didn’t agree to the deal.
We ended our trip to Chengdu and boarded the train back to Beijing. When the car arrived in Zhengzhou, Xu Cheng and I wanted to get off to Zhengzhou to see. Cao Beihong was eager to go home, Xu Cheng and I got off the train, and Cao Beihong went straight back to Beijing.
Off the train is already midnight, we saw the waiting room lying around a lot of people sleeping, we two also found a place to lay a newspaper to sleep on the floor. Wake up is already dawn, found stolen. I originally pillowed the schoolbag, which has a few changes of clothes, the schoolbag is missing, pillowed is a military kettle I carry with me, the money on my body was looted, plus my uncle gave me a total of 15 dollars more than 20, a father left me the hero brand gold pen is also gone. Xu Cheng was okay, not stolen, he only had two dollars on him.
We went to the police station to report the case, a police officer on duty, listened to us, only said a “what can be done”. Seeing his indifferent look, we did not want to bother with words.
We went to Zhengzhou University and saw that the windows of the school building were bricked up, and the scene was similar to that of Chengdu.
When I finally returned to Beijing, my family really thought we had gone to harvest wheat, and when I told the truth, my mother did not complain about me and said it was good to come back safely.
Then I heard the sad news that my second cousin in Chongqing had been killed by a stray bullet from a machine gun.
My aunt’s first and second cousins used to come to our house, and my second cousin and my second cousin were the same age. He went to a military school and enrolled in the army, wearing a military uniform, handsome, how handsome. But now he is dead.
I want to cry, I miss my second cousin, I hate martial arts.
Let me write down his name here, Xu Zeng Shi, nickname Er Tou, born in 1946 in Beijing, a dog.
Written in Beijing in February 2019
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