Do you know what is “oil beat beat”?
In 1963, I went to high school, or in Chongqing Jiangbei County, the first middle school. Our grade a total of two classes, our second class called high six six (2) class. I remember that year, the county high school recruited a total of 4 classes.
Unlike in junior high school, most of the students in the class came from the town of Shuitu, but from all over the county. At that Time, Jiangbei County was a large county with a population of more than 700,000 people, but also a poor county. In terms of transportation alone, there were two roads in the county: one was the Han-Yu Road that passed through Jiangbei County before the liberation, and the other was a simple road of about thirty kilometers from the county town of Shuitu to the township of Yiyan, which was built in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, namely the Tu-Yi Road. Most of the places in the county are not accessible by road, and there are few buses in the places that are accessible by road, which are mainly used to transport supplies.
I remember that from the day the road was repaired until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, there were no buses. Therefore, despite the fact that there is only a hundred-mile radius in a county, the area is relatively closed, and even the accent has a big difference, with different dialects and vernaculars everywhere. For example, if you say “you”, some places say that it is “Italian”, and for example, if you say “cow”, some places say that it is “oil “, there are also places to say “plane” as “gray chicken”, “meeting” as “open fee “, “yard” as “bay”.
Of course, this does not affect the communication between students, as long as the context of the meaning can be understood, just feel a little funny. But dialect and vernacular language is different, not the local people will not understand what it means. For example, do you know what “oil beat beat” means?
There are a few students from two districts (county jurisdiction) in the class who often form a circle to play chess, and the onlookers also help. You could often hear people shouting, “What’s the point of jumping horses? “You’re the one who’s playing chess, General!” We in Shuitu Town didn’t know what “oil beat beat beat” meant at first, but we thought it was funny, for example, my friend Fang did. He kept repeatedly trying to figure out, play and chew what “oil beat beat beat” really means, and when he had the chance he would “live and learn” a little, even if it was far-fetched. What I didn’t expect was that he would get into trouble one day, and what I didn’t expect was that I would also be deeply involved and even become the main character.
Student Council President
One afternoon, Chen, a member of the Life committee, and Fang had a disagreement about doing the classroom cleaning and ended up disagreeing. After dinner, Fang and I went to the classroom to study. There was no one in the classroom yet, and not long afterwards, Tong came in. Child is the president of the school’s student council, the largest official among the students in the school. She called out to Fang and said, “Fang X, why don’t you do the classroom cleaning?” Her voice was loud and frequent, and more or less official. Probably the life member had reflected to her what happened in the afternoon.
Fang said, “I’m not supposed to do it today, I just did it not long ago, why is it my turn again?” The two of them argued back and forth, saying that Fang should do it, while Fang said he shouldn’t do it. Remember, Fang said, “I just won’t do it!” And the child said, “That shall not be okay, you silent pour up your party X is so ‘mah mah mah mah’.” “Ma miscellaneous” is a dialect cursing words, is not to speak the rules of the meaning of haphazardly, ‘Mo pour up’ is a more complex dialect, there are “private think” meaning.
Hearing the child cursing himself, Fang also fire, loudly questioned “Who are you saying is ‘Ma Zha Zha’! “You are the ‘mah mah mah mah’!” The child is not ambiguous at all. Finally how things are finished, I do not remember, only remember that afterwards party very angry, he said to me privately: “Even if I am wrong, she should not say I ‘miscellaneous’, help me also did not help this law, is not a ‘oil beat beat ‘!” You see him again. We did not think at the time, this incident later became the cause of the “oil beating beaten incident”.
Like me, Fang also had problems with his Family background, but he grew up following his brother. As his brother was the vice-principal of the largest elementary school in Jiangbei County at the time, namely Shuitu Elementary School, Fang’s growth was still relatively smooth, and I think he even had more or less the habits of a gentry.
Evaluation of the third best student
I remember shortly after the start of senior year, the school to evaluate the last year’s three good students, the procedure is first recommended by the students to review, and then voted on the list of candidates, and finally submitted to the school for approval. I don’t know why, our class push the three good students to choose candidates that day, not only the class teacher Tan teacher came, even the principal Chen, the school party branch members, political science teacher Wu teacher came.
The first procedure is the student recommendation (no one would recommend themselves at that time). Although the child’s academic performance is not much, not good enough for the three good “learning good”, but good family background, not to mention political performance: she is the school student council president, but also the school party branch of the first batch of students in the development of party members, (then secondary school students are very difficult to join the regiment, let alone join the party) is very hot. So the child was soon proposed. When the recommender talked about her studies, of course, she would not stop talking about how good her academic performance was, but very cleverly said that she had a very clear study purpose, studied hard and made great progress.
After the recommendation was over, the evaluation started and many students expressed their opinions.
To be honest, these opinions are basically superficial, clichés and bullshit. There were a lot of political slogans when talking about the advantages, and the disadvantages were downplayed. I knew I had no chance anyway, so I didn’t listen much at all, and my mind flew off to nowhere.
At that moment I heard a female student’s voice saying, “I’ll give an opinion to the child.” I looked up and saw that it was Xu. At first I thought she was going to sing praises to Tong too, so I didn’t care, but as I listened I couldn’t believe my ears: “She really mentioned?” I can’t remember what she actually mentioned, but I remember that her comments were very sharp and very real. I secretly applauded her, but also worried about her: “This guy has eaten a leopard’s guts, daring to give her advice like this!” Xu even spoke twice.
After she finished speaking and sat down, the classroom was quiet, and the students looked at each other.
At this point, perhaps inspired and encouraged by Xu, sitting next to me has not said anything Fang “stretch” stood up. He said, “I’ll also give some advice to the child,” his words seemed to come out of his mouth, and his voice even trembled a little. He spoke longer, and even began to speak a little incoherently. He didn’t say anything directly about the conflict he had with Tong. But I understood what was going on right away. The central point of his speech was: as the president of the school’s student council, Tong had the responsibility and obligation to help her classmates make progress together, but she had problems in her working methods. Instead of doing patient and meticulous thought work with her classmates, she just preached some big ideas, even simple and rude, lecturing people at every turn, and calling others “mah-mah-mah”, which not only won’t help the students, but will hurt them.
He finally said in particular: “This is not a ‘oil beat beat'”, this guy took the opportunity to “live and learn” a. The more he said, the more pleased he became, and even repeatedly said several “oil beat beat beat”. I think, this guy has had enough!
The party’s comments were over. After a while, the class teacher sitting at the back of the Tan teacher asked a question: “just raised the opinion of the students, you have not said that you do not agree with the child for the three good students.” Xu stood up and said, “I agree.” But Fang, who seemed to be still angry, stood up and said, “No!”
I saw Xu also voted in favor of the child, while Fang voted against the child.
Fang finally out of the mouth, also played a little “oil beat beat”, but no one thought that this “oil beat beat” disaster can cause a big.
Mao Zedong thought is “oil beat beat”?
One day I went to the classroom to study in the evening, as soon as I entered the classroom, I saw the classroom students all clustered in the back of the classroom, it turned out that they were looking at the classroom after the piece of special “class struggle” on the blackboard of a new article, the author is the class study committee member Chen, she is also just developed into the new party members, the title is The title of the article was “The ‘oil beating beaten’ reference is incorrect”. “That’s a strange title!” I thought to myself, at the same time involuntarily alert, and arched forward to look carefully.
Who knows not to look at it, a look at the gas is not a place to come, and the more you look at the more angry, see the end I have been out of anger. I asked loudly with a red face “What is this logic? Also allow people to speak, but also allow people to give advice?” The party also said with great excitement that they would “go along with it to the end”, and the students were also talking about it.
It turns out that this sprawling, densely written a blackboard article, but the central meaning is very simple: the evaluation of the three good students that day Fang said that he only know Tong help him to talk about big ideas, the result is still a “oil beat beat” the mention is wrong. Because the child is Mao Zedong thought to help Fang, Fang said this is “oil beat beat”, then Mao Zedong thought is not “oil beat beat” it?
The first thing you need to do is to say that Mao Zedong Thought is “oil beat beat beat”, this is still a big deal, this is not the sky!
I can’t calm down: such a simple trick of logic to steal concepts, but even published in the open, this is a nakedly false accusation, referring to the deer as a horse! This is a shameless and malicious personal attack and political persecution, shameless! I angrily asked, “Is there any truth, any justice?” Finally, I asked the class officers in charge of the blackboard if they were allowed to express different opinions, and the answer was “Yes.”
When I returned to my dorm room after study hall, my classmates were still talking, and I continued to express my opinion angrily. I naively thought that my classmates would side with me, who couldn’t see such a simple and obvious question with such absurd logic? But I was disappointed: the students were talking, but most of them had ambiguous attitudes, many thought it was unclear, and many wanted to say something …..
The next day I got up early and started writing a rebuttal to Chen’s diatribe. I don’t think I’ve ever been as literate and thoughtful as I was when I wrote that article, and by the end of my morning study, the article was finished in one fell swoop. At first I titled it “What is this logic? I felt that it was not very clear, so I changed it to “Chen is stealing the concept”, but I felt that the word “stealing” was a bit disrespectful to my classmates, so I simply named it “Chen XX is out of context”. I read the article again several times at lunchtime and made the final changes and touches. I knew I couldn’t be caught in the crosshairs and grabbed by the pigtail.
That afternoon I handed the article to the blackboard moderator. The article was to the following effect.
First, Fang’s opinion is that there is a problem with the way children help their classmates, they only talk about theories instead of doing patient and careful thought work, so it will not play any role, in the common language “no role” is called “oil beat beat beat”, not that the theories itself is “oil beat beat beat”, so Chen’s statement is out of context, changing the concept. Secondly, Chen said that Tong was using Mao Zedong Thought to help Fang, but is Tong’s thought Mao Zedong Thought? I even said without sarcasm: Can we expect that one day the “Tong XX Quotations” will be published?
About two weeks later, my article was published in full on the blackboard at the back of the classroom. I waited for their rebuttal and prepared my mind for it.
About a week later, the rebuttal article came out, written by none other than my sister in the same class. This was a hoot, and the two siblings got into it. Wu, the political science teacher, took the opportunity to preach the complexity and intensity of the class struggle, saying everywhere: “Sister and brother, with a clear flag!”
To be fair, the momentum and intensity of my sister’s essay was much worse than mine, but normally she is quite good at writing, and she should be the best in the class as far as writing is concerned, but this time it was clearly underlined and not worth refuting. But I was still furious. I thought: you don’t have the courage to stand up for the truth, can’t you just keep quiet? If you really disagreed with me, couldn’t you have communicated with me privately?
For quite some time I did not forgive her. Only recently did I realize that I had given her a hard time in the first place. This incident was a so-called “big right and wrong” issue at the time, her own brother jumped out, of course, when the sister will be implicated, if not to show a little attitude can not be justified? So I was relieved, and even felt a touch of guilt.
I continued to wait for them to have the weight of the counterattack, but never appeared. On the contrary, one day Fang came to me, and he vaguely told me, “Forget it, they just want me to admit that I was retaliating, and it’s okay if I admit it.” I asked, “You admitted it?” He didn’t answer me directly, but said, “I want to put an end to this.”
I understood, I had nothing to say, and I waited for the storm to come ……
I waited for a long time, and instead of the storm that criticized me, a bigger storm came. But this was not directed at me, but was a prelude to the Cultural Revolution. The storm that criticized Wu Han’s “Hai Rui dismissal” and the “Yanshan night talk” in Sanjia Village came, and it got more and more violent. The “oil beating incident” seems to be drowned out and forgotten. But soon there was another incident.
Who called out reactionary slogans?
After a march to denounce Wu Han and the “Three Villages”, Y, who was the secretary of the former class reunion branch and is now an organizing committee member of the school reunion committee, couldn’t wait to get to know the situation among the students. Were there any who were dressed in rags on purpose?”
At that moment, a student surnamed Zeng said, “It seems that I heard Fang shouting slogans, ‘Take back the proletariat’s seal handle’ as ‘Take back the bourgeoisie’s seal handle’. At that time I said: ‘Bravo! What did you just shout?’ He didn’t admit it.” “Really?” Y was like a treasure. Had said, “I didn’t hear it very clearly either.” But Y said, “This is no accident, there are class roots here, he is a landlord by birth, and not long ago he described Mao Zedong Thought as ‘oil beating’, and today he shouted reactionary slogans.” So a large-character poster of “Who is the person who calls reactionary slogans” appeared in the most prominent place of the school, signed by the student surnamed Zeng.
This time I couldn’t and didn’t dare to say anything anymore, I was only worried about Fang. Soon after, the big words of criticism against Fang came all over the place.
The unforgettable July 5
As the “Cultural Revolution” deepened, the 1966 college entrance examination was postponed for six months.
July 5, 1966 was a day I will never forget, and a day I felt a great shame.
That afternoon, the school called a meeting with the senior class, and Principal Chen announced that according to the instructions from the higher level, one-third of the senior class (some so-called good performers, mainly the “red and strong” students) would stay in school to continue the Cultural Revolution, and two-thirds of them would go to the countryside for “social Education“. “I was relieved. I was relieved, thinking I should go to the “social education”.
Who knew that the principal would change his tone and say that there were still a few students who needed to go back to the countryside to participate in labor. But the last sentence added: these people will be qualified to take the college entrance examination in six months. I couldn’t listen to any more, and I didn’t dare to listen to any more, I knew there must be me in it, yes, there was me and there was Fang. I just felt my heart sinking, sinking, sinking into the bottomless abyss ……
In addition to Fang and me, there was another student in the class surnamed Dai, who became a reactionary student overnight after his classmates denounced him for making a private statement against the six-month extension of the college entrance exam. There were two other students in Mr. Wu’s class, one surnamed Liu, who was said to have been wrongly classified as a landlord because of his family’s composition, and therefore wrote a letter to the local working group saying that he was reversing the case for his landlord family. Another student surnamed Long, who was in my junior high school class, was a victim of the so-called class struggle in his class. There were five of them. We were probably the five percent of the hundred or so people in our grade. (Because at that time it was often said that more than ninety-five percent of the people were good.)
That night, on the steps outside the classroom, Principal Chen summoned the five of us. I remember that night was particularly dark, there was no one around and no lights, and it was so dark that we couldn’t see each other’s faces. Principal Chen did not have an opening speech, nor was he as cryptic as when he announced the distribution list in the afternoon, but said bluntly, “The five of you are reactionary in your thinking, you must go Home and seriously participate in labor and reform your thinking, otherwise you will become more and more reactionary and will stand in opposition to the people!”
As soon as I heard that, I immediately fell into the ice cellar, the whole body shivered, teeth cackling; then I felt jumped into the sea of fire, baked by the fire, a while sweat to the whole body clothes are wet. Originally this afternoon I still hold a ray of hope, thinking that we are only bad performance, but I did not think the school has put us into the hostile camp. I was completely desperate.
Principal Chen also specifically said the “oil beat beat” incident, but he did not say that Fang described Mao Zedong Thought as “oil beat beat”, but said: “Tong is a newly developed member of our branch, but you think she is not even good enough for the third student Eligibility, is our branch so blind that it is not as good as you party?” Principal Chen also did not say anything about Fang calling out reactionary slogans, nor did he liquidate any of my crimes.
After the principal finished, I tried to catch the last straw like a man in the water and made a request that the school contact a rural production team for the five of us so that we could work there collectively. What I actually had in mind at the time was, “Let the poor peasants identify us and see if we are really reactionary.”
Who knew that Principal Chen would immediately give me a rebuke: “No! If you are all together, you will become more and more reactionary.” I was silenced. What else could we say? We had nothing to say. Finally we timidly asked when we would leave school, and the principal said coldly, “Tonight!”
It was particularly dark that night, and I felt that my future was also dark ……
Postscript
(a) After the Cultural Revolution, people who knew the truth told me the truth about the “oil beating” incident.
The first time I saw it, it was not a big deal after the merit evaluation. However, the class struggle in another class of our grade, i.e. senior six six (1) class, was in full swing (the details of which will be explained in a separate article), and our class teacher, Mr. Tan, felt that he should also keep up with the situation, so he went to the class teacher of the first class, the aforementioned political teacher, Mr. Wu, to “learn from the experience”. Wu said: “Your old Tan is not tense class struggle this string, even around the class struggle are blind to. Look at your class last evaluation, there are two students actually mentioned our branch development of new party members, and also said what ‘oil beat beat’!” So Mr. Tan asked him for further advice, and Wu did the same to Tan for some guidance, and soon the article on “oil beat up” came out.
It is said that if Fang hadn’t blocked it, it would have been the first one to make a comment, Xu, who was unlucky.
In addition, in the “oil beat beat” incident, the reason why a long time on my article did not fight back, because the people concerned are under the leadership of Mr. Wu’s organization, ready to comment on my article like the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to comment on the “open letter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” to a comment, two comments, three comments. …… just because the “Cultural Revolution” has begun, did not have time to carry out.
(2) The following is about Principal Chen and several teachers.
Principal Chen came to Southwest China after the liberation of Shanghai and joined the Southward Service Corps. President Chen’s career was not smooth. His ex-wife was classified as a “rightist” in the 1957 anti-rightist movement, and he was not very active in all the campaigns to rectify the situation. Mr. Fan, the former vice-principal of the first middle school and an old democrat, asked to give his place to Principal Chen when he first raised his salary after the Cultural Revolution, saying that it was to thank Principal Chen for making him safe and sound during all the campaigns.
I remember when I first entered high school, Principal Chen also talked to me once, encouraging me to study hard, to climb the peak of science, and to serve the motherland in the future. “After the Cultural Revolution, my second sister came to participate in the 90th anniversary celebration of Jiang Yi Middle School. She was a graduate of Jiang Yi High School, Class 60, and later entered the philosophy department of a university, and coincidentally, Mr. Tan was also her class teacher. When my second sister met Principal Chen, who was nearly 90 years old, my sister said, “Hello, Principal! Do you still know me?” Principal Chen said to my sister with affection and guilt, “How come I don’t know you? I am sorry to your siblings for making them suffer so much at school!” My sister said, “How can you be blamed for that, it was those times.” When my sister told us about this later, my eyes got wet again. Principal Chen was the only person who apologized to me for the injustice I had suffered before the Cultural Revolution.
Next, it was time to talk about my class teacher, Mr. Tan. It is interesting that he was the class teacher of three of us, and it is even more interesting that we worked in the same unit after the Cultural Revolution, and he was my subordinate. He told people many times that I might never forgive him for the rest of my life. In fact, he is a very poor character. According to the past, he was also a person with some historical problems, so he was usually careful everywhere and kept up with the trend. When the movement came, he immediately cowered in the corner. Some people in Jiang Yi Middle School said that he was usually “left or right”, and when the movement came, he was like a “tail dog”.
For me, I do not care to forgive him, I still call him Mr. Tan, never call him by his first name, and usually take care of him as much as possible in the work. Just once at a class reunion, someone came up with a title, asking me and two other students who were doing well in school at the time to take a picture with him. He also said that the three of you are his “favorite students”. In fact, I was fine with it, but when I heard the words “favorite students”, I could no longer move my feet, and the photo was not taken.
I still remember when celebrating his 80th birthday, the wine was half full, Mr. Tan came up to me with a glass of wine, and said intermittently “I taught your three sisters! Three of them!” I knew what he meant, so I nodded, didn’t say anything, but clinked glasses with him. Until his death, Mr. Tan never said a word to me about the past, and certainly no words of apology, so I never said anything to him to forgive him, but at least he expressed to others that he hoped I could forgive him. May his soul rest in peace.
Let’s talk about Mr. Wu. Wu came from a landowning background, joined the workforce at the beginning of the liberation, engaged in land reform, and then entered the political education department of Beijing Normal University. After his studies, he was assigned to teach in Baoshan County, Shanghai, where he did not get along with the leaders and once attempted suicide. “Two years before the Cultural Revolution, he was transferred to Jiang Yi Middle School, where he taught politics and later became a member of the school branch. Wu had read some Marx and Lenin books and was known by some to have a certain level of theory. He was eloquent and could lecture very well. If he had not been guided by wrong theories and constantly tensed the “strings of class struggle” in the classroom, his lectures might have been well received by the students.
Mr. Wu was a devout believer in the theory of class struggle and a pioneer in the implementation of the ultra-left line. After arriving at Jiang Yi Middle School, he was the first to change the school garden into a vegetable garden, criticizing the school’s botanical garden and bonsai as a bourgeois mood; he was the first to criticize the school’s reactionary authority, knocking down those teachers with high academic standards and loved by the students for “unfounded” charges; he was also the first to carry out among the students He also started a “living class struggle” among the students, branding many of them as “reactionary students” and “filial sons and grandsons of the exploiting class”, making the campus full of gunpowder.
On the other hand, Mr. Wu was also a strong-willed person. He responded to Mao Zedong’s call to “go to the big rivers to exercise” and took the lead in winter swimming at the school, which he continued until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He was a good erhu player, and he was a high level amateur, but he seldom played it, because in his opinion, the classical erhu repertoire of the past was of the landlord and bourgeois mood. Once an erhu enthusiast in my class asked him to play Liu Tianhua’s “Chanting in Sickness”, which he did, but not without emphasizing that it should be appreciated critically.
After Wu arrived at Jiang Yi Middle School, he soon became a popular figure in the wind and was a prominent figure until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He was a fighter in the class struggle, the embodiment of the correct line, and even became a part of the students’ image, and his aura even overwhelmed Principal Chen, whose style was always low-key. All these made him gradually become oblivious and extremely inflated. He did not even take the working group sent by his superiors into account, and went on his own in the sky. But his end was also tragic. Within a few days after the five of us “reactionary students” were driven out of the school by the forces he represented, at the behest of the working group stationed at the school, he was uncovered, beaten, and even had one foot stepped on. Because of his deep-seated grievances, many teachers and students at the school had long been uncomfortable with his commanding and untouchable attitude. As soon as they said he was beaten, overnight, large posters came, and students who were his “favorite students” yesterday also betrayed him.
Because he had too many enemies, he was soon seized and even physically destroyed, and many of those who destroyed him were his most trusted and admired students in the past. But he was a smart man. “After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he began to find himself, no longer a blind follower, no longer a sharp-tongued man. He was later transferred to the Party School as a theoretical instructor, and was known by some as the teacher with the highest theoretical level in the Party School. Once I had a casual conversation with him, and when talking about corruption in the Party and in society, he became agitated, and I seemed to see his shadow again back then.
Wu died shortly after his retirement, having lived only in his sixties. And I just heard a little story about him: After he fell ill and was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, he told his family not to continue treatment, but just to prepare painkillers. Soon he went away, and it is said that he did not suffer much, while not leaving his family in a difficult situation because of his illness. This was the last self-improvement of a materialist. It should be said that Mr. Wu was not a bad person, and under normal circumstances he could even have been an excellent teacher. He was a spiritual aberration created by that era.
(3) It also seems appropriate to talk about my classmate, Chen, who was the pioneer in the “oil beating” incident.
Her family was born in the rural areas, under the middle peasants. Her family is in a more enlightened area of Jiangbei County, and her father seems to be a carpenter, so she doesn’t have much of the characteristic selfishness and narrow-mindedness of a peasant. When she first entered high school, she was not a cadre, but was selected after the class line became severe. She was not a bad-hearted person, but essentially a good-hearted person. She studied at an upper-middle level and was not only the best among the three party members in our class, but was also considered excellent among all the cadres in our class, so she was generally recognized by her classmates and had good relations with them. Because of her good family background and good grades, she was one of the two students the school was going to send to study in the former Soviet Union in 1966, but could not do so because of the Cultural Revolution.
She is a straightforward person with a spirited style, and does not tend to follow the crowd. However, she lacked the power and sensitivity of a cadre and was often used as a gun. “At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, she was arrested and fought during the criticism of the so-called “reactionary line” (this was less than three months after we left school). Besides acting as a “gunman” in the “oil beating” incident, she was also one of the most active faction leaders during the Cultural Revolution. “At the end of the Cultural Revolution, she became an alternate member of the Jiangbei County Party Committee and was assigned to work in Jiang San Middle School, where she was a prominent figure. Later, she was removed from her post during the liquidation of the three types of people in the Cultural Revolution, and was transferred out of Jiang Sanzhong to teach in a township junior high school, and then to teach junior high school language in the second experimental middle school in the town of Two Roads, and is now retired. She is now one of the most active contacts and organizers of our high school reunion.
Lastly, let’s talk about Tong. In fact, the child is not a bad person. The reason why she became an officer, among other reasons, I think she is older than us is also a reason. In junior high school we were still teenagers, while she was already a youth. When we first entered high school, we were just some older kids, and she was already an adult. Therefore she was much more knowledgeable than the average classmate and was more likely to gain the trust of teachers. She was not from Jiang Yi Middle School in junior high school, but was a student in Shuitu Township Private Middle School and was the student council president.
When she first entered high school, she wasn’t really a big deal in the school, even in our class. The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you want to do. In the second year of high school, the class line was implemented more severely, and many student cadres were removed because of their family origins, while many of the senior student cadres had already graduated, so there were vacancies in the student cadres. At that time, several other student cadres for power and profit and the farce, but finally let the child check the landing peach, as the student council president.
In fact, the child mind is not bad, far from Y so complicated. She is merely a child spoiled by that era. She is straightforward, what there is to say. She studied hard and could barely keep up. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the child reached the peak of her student days. I had been kicked out of school at the time and didn’t know what she had become. I heard from my classmates that the head of the school’s working group, Hu, the deputy secretary of the county party committee, said that all the teachers in the county were inferior to one child (another saying was that no child could be found). At that time, the child can be said to be eight-faced authority. She could call the teachers in the county to lecture at will, accuse and lecture them at will, and it is said that she once scolded a teacher for being worse than a turd. But soon she was also beaten down and miserable, and was criticized by the assembly several times. Later she returned to the countryside and faded out of sight.
“During the Cultural Revolution, I passed by her house twice, once to escape the armed struggle and stayed at her house for one night. The other time was at the end of the Cultural Revolution when I was idle at home and stayed at her house again when I went to the mountains to pull coal. She was still very warm to me. However, when my classmates gathered after the Cultural Revolution, she was determined not to attend, as she felt that she was in a bad situation and did not have a formal job, so she had no face to see her classmates. In fact, her situation is not bad, I heard that she also co-owned a factory, and her income is good, and her family has built a two-story house. However, at a recent gathering of our class, after my sister’s repeated persuasion (she and my sister seem to have a good relationship), she finally came. However, in the conversation, I felt as if her mind was still stuck in the past. May she jump out of the nightmare of the past soon.
Oh! And Xu. This is the most beautiful and unruly girl in our class. After the “oil beating” incident, I was too busy to know what was happening around her. “After the Cultural Revolution, she went to the countryside, during which I only met her once, but I heard a number of things about her.
One is that in order to help her transfer out of the countryside, a good friend of hers bought 300 flint stones, which were in high demand at that time, and gave them to the people concerned in her name, but after she found out about it, she “unreasonably” asked her friend to take them back, of course, this is just what I heard.
Another thing is that when her sister, who was a doctor, was ordered to send aid to Sudan, the organization asked her what she wanted before she left, and she said that she asked the organization to transfer her sister, who was a youth, out of the countryside. She said she would like to ask the organization to transfer her sister, who was a youth, out of the countryside, but the transfer order was blocked by the local authorities. It was around 1976 when I was leading some students to open a school on Baishi Mountain, and one day I saw Xu by accident. I asked her what she was doing here, and she told me she was visiting her godmother.
That night we talked all night, I can’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that she advised me to change my temper, and I also advised her to change her temper in return. It is said that the next day she left Jiangbei County, to join her sister back from Sudan to go, since then I have not seen her again. She buried her name, never contacted her former classmates, and did not allow her family to tell anyone else about her. All we know is that she is now in Baoji. Good luck to her.
Written on September 17, 2010
Addendum: After a few years, the aforementioned classmate has undergone many more changes. Chen has sadly passed away, and before her death she had been one of the active organizers of our class reunions; Tong is much more cheerful than in the past and has been attending class reunions regularly; Xu has gotten in touch with her classmates and has been back to Chongqing to reunite with them in 2017. She is living a happy life and is the most bubbly person in the WeChat group of Senior 6-6(2) class.
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