When the Cultural Revolution began, I was just nine years old, in the second grade of elementary school. I often heard people talk about how they were as a child and brag about their childhood, but I was a slow reactor and a late enlightened person, and I am ashamed to say that I can remember few things clearly before I was nine years old. A lot of memories are blurred, and some stories and paragraphs are described by others before they are re-implanted in my cerebral cortex. It was only after others helped me recall the past that I remembered it. I remember one day during recess, a beautiful female student suddenly stood up in front of me and asked me, in a very innocent tone, if my mother’s name was something. I said yes, she was my mother. The next thing you do is not speak, for a short while, everyone is dumb, and then the female student’s eyes twinkled and said that last night she went to see a play, “Sister Jiang” starring my mother.
Never forget the expression of this female classmate, round eyes rosy cheeks, mesmerizing and engraved in people’s hearts. It seems that I started to know things from that Time, and only then did I start to have clear memories. In those days, the stars of children’s hearts were not beautiful famous actors, but heroic characters in stories. We were full of black and white good guys and bad guys, aspiring to martyrs and revolutionaries, and hating traitors and counter-revolutionaries. The envious expressions of my female classmates were as if I was really a descendant of Comrade Jiang Sister, really a martyr’s orphan. Perhaps it was only myself who had this illusion, and for this illusion I was proud of myself for several days. I think the girl fell in love with me, but of course the truth should be that I fell in love with that girl. My little head was in a tizzy, and time and space were misplaced. I couldn’t remember what I had read in class or what the teacher was saying, and I spent my days reveling in the complacency of being a descendant of the revolution and enjoying the happy feeling of being an orphan of a martyr. My mother’s halo enveloped me, and her popularity on stage accompanied me throughout my childhood. The words “whose son is this?” echoed in my ears over and over again as she became one with the heroes she played. My mother’s female disciples doted on me, and anyone who saw me would let out a squeal or two of surprise. They grabbed me, cajoled me, took me out, stuffed my pockets with candy and all sorts of fun trinkets. It was a busy time and I didn’t have many opportunities to be close to my Parents, and I remember that they rarely had time to perfume with me. The aura of a heroic figure was just an illusion; my parents were sad all day long, always in the midst of such and such a campaign. My nanny, who was responsible for looking after me, often complained about organizing their luggage, because my parents had to go out constantly, to the mountains and the countryside, to the factories and coal mines, to various corners of society, to participate in the Four Clean-ups, to participate in the socialist Education movement. When I didn’t know what “experiencing Life” meant, I had already heard these four words countless times.
The Cultural Revolution was only the biggest and longest of a series of dramatic movements. The Cultural Revolution did not suddenly begin and end on a certain day. It was like a continuous river, inseparable from the past and inseparable from the future. My meaningful memories began precisely with the Cultural Revolution, and it began to become clear and an inseparable part of my life.
It was also at the age of nine that I suddenly realized that my mother was no heroic figure, and that her rise to fame had become a huge burden. Reality and imagination, there is too much distance. That summer, when we were cooling off in the courtyard, I heard the adults talking in a very scary tone about the Cultural Revolution that had just begun to be launched. All the people living in our courtyard were celebrities, the so-called “three high achievers”. I never understood what the three highs and the three lows were, but I only knew about the “famous actors” and the “high intellectuals”. I heard my mother say that she had prepared a pair of cloth shoes, and that if the revolutionary masses wanted her to parade in the street, she would wear them so that the soles of her feet would not be worn out with blisters. My father, as usual, kept quiet while one of the neighbors said who had been killed and whose leg had been broken, and they talked cautiously, already sensing that a great disaster was coming. One by one, they were in a state of fear, and finally came to the common conclusion that the rebels really rushed in to seize people, absolutely not to resist, but to follow honestly, guilty or not guilty first admitted to say.
I don’t understand why school is suddenly out of the question. For a child, this is a great thing, you can play as much as you want, and every day is like a holiday. Our elementary school became the staging ground for the Red Guards, and the Red Guards from abroad set up camp and bunked in the classrooms, trashing the good school like a pigsty. When they left, the tables were overturned, the bench legs were removed, and the wires and lamp heads were cut, saying that the copper cores inside could be sold for money. The Cultural Revolution was like a carnival in my first memories, smashing everything and knocking down everything in a big way. The city was full of foreign children, and some local children older than us had gone to other cities to join the revolutionary tandem. Those who had more siblings bragged to me endlessly about the adventures of their older siblings. The world outside was so exciting that I remember it was most painful to hate myself for being too young, because I was too young to be involved in many fun and exciting things.
As far as I can remember, the Cultural Revolution had no Culture except revolution. At that time, the streets were bustling with activity, everywhere vibrant, everywhere sunny. What I liked to see most was the parade, the parade of people wearing papier-mâché high hats, with signs on their chests, banging small gongs, playing small drums, all the way to the vast over. We greeted the past with joy, followed the parade, walked far away, and then followed another parade back. I can’t remember the faces of those who were paraded, or even the words written on the signs on their chests, they all looked the same. We ran to Nanjing University to read the big-character posters, read the cartoons, and watch the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team perform their programs. This was the center of the Cultural Revolution, the fountainhead of all kinds of fierce movements, where tweeters were hung, where there were criticism sessions, where there was no day and night, no spring, summer, autumn and winter. More than ten years later, I became a student of this university, and my deepest impression at that time was how this school had become smaller. In my memory, the crowded Nanjing University was as vast and boundless as a forest.
We often ran to my parents’ flat to play, and the Family compound was just a wall away from there. One day, I saw a wall full of my mother’s large-print posters. It was like the kind of giant billboards you see on the street today, and I stood in front of the big posters with my little friend, looking very small. My mother’s name was written in a crooked way, with a cross in red ink. I remember being so ashamed of myself that I wanted to dig a hole and burrow into the ground immediately. The children watched with great interest, I did not run away, I did not run away, but I was watching with my head on the side. I don’t remember the content of the large-character poster, but I can only remember the anti-party remarks of my mother, and I can’t forget one sentence, which is “The Communist Party is a stone in the pit, stinky and hard”, which is too graphic and striking. The youngster who was reading the big-character poster together turned around and pointed at my nose and denounced.
“That’s so reactionary, how can your mother say that?”
I also felt reactionary, too reactionary.
My partner puffed up and said, “Your mother wants to throw the Communists into the pit!”
I didn’t know why my mother said that and how she could say that. It became a secret in my mind until the end of the Cultural Revolution, when I happened to ask my mother about it during a conversation and she cried out injustice. My mother said I was a member of the Communist Party, and so was your father, so why should I say that? But then she had to admit that she couldn’t remember.
The raid is a lot of people will encounter. One day, suddenly came a group of aggressive Red Guard juniors, my parents escorted to the corner, sleeve a stroke, rummaging through the boxes to copy the Home. It is not true to say that I was not frightened at all by this fierce scene. I was taken to the kitchen, where the young generals searched me in a very civilized and subtle way. They accused me strongly of my parents’ crimes, and then praised and praised me, saying that I was a good boy, that I loved Chairman Mao and would stand firmly by the Communist Party. They didn’t treat me as an outsider at all, knowing that I had a lot of Chairman Mao’s statues hidden in my body, and said that this alone was enough to prove that I was a member of the proletarian command.
These words spoke to the heart of a small child, and in those days, nothing was more heartfelt and warm than such recognition. The sky and the earth are not as big as the Party’s kindness, and father and mother are not as close as Chairman Mao. I really have a rich collection on my body, at that time the badge is very strong, afraid of others to grab, I put all the badges are reverse pin on the clothes. The result is like a magic trick, I lifted this piece of clothing, light up a few pieces of treasure like, lift another lapel, and a few pieces of treasure like. The young generals were amazed as their eyes lit up. Several of the rebels were my mother’s favorite disciples and turned out to be extremely familiar with them. They groped around on me and coaxed me into a frenzy, but their purpose was to find out if my mother had transferred anything, secretly, into her son’s pocket. I was not averse to them, but felt a little embarrassed, because by then there was some gender awareness, by this group of female rebels made very awkward. After one rebellion finished groping, another rebellion came over to groping, up and down, inside and out, all let them search all over. Suddenly, a junior general ran over to report that they had found incriminating evidence, and several of the juniors on this side suddenly became excited and looked as if they had accomplished a great deal, not caring about me, and turned their heads to run over there.
I vaguely heard that the Gold was copied, which at the time, was a great evidence of guilt. In my teenage memory, gold is definitely not a good thing, only the landlord bourgeoisie will have it, only the reactionary faction will treat it as a treasure. Owning gold means you are the enemy of the people, means you are the evil exploiting class. I heard that the bad people who were raided often hid the gold in pillowcases and buried it under the floor. Since the gold was copied from our house, I was sure that my parents, as the Red Guard junior said, must not be any good. We have many bookcases in our house, and when I heard that gold had been copied, the first thing that came to my mind was the yellow metal rails that were set in the bookcases. I still don’t understand why I thought that at the time and why I had such a presumptuous misunderstanding. Maybe it was the babysitter and others who said that our books were valuable, or maybe it was the class struggle education in the little people’s books and movies that made me highly alert to the revolution. Anyway, I was convinced and decided that those metal tracks were gold. My parents encrusted the gold in the bookcase, thinking they could pull the wool over people’s eyes, but they didn’t realize that even a fox is cunning, but it can’t beat a good hunter. The revolutionary masses are all Sun Wukong, each with golden eyes of fire.
Later, I learned that the so-called gold was just a gold necklace given to my mother by my grandmother. I heard the screams of my mother being beaten and the rebels reprimanding each other, obviously not satisfied with such a small gain. They continued to rummage through the cupboards and continue to be vicious, making more and more noise and getting smaller and smaller. I was alone in the kitchen, my heart racing, my mind wandering. From time to time, some rebels came to the kitchen, looking here and there, touching a few, even the bottles of oil, salt and vinegar, and refused to let go. In my old novel “Wandering Night”, I once wrote this passage about the house raid.
Until it was almost dark, the disappointed rebels returned to their homes. All the rooms were sealed except the kitchen. My parents went to the cowshed that day, and the nanny left with a package, leaving me alone.
I was completely forgotten. My parents forgot about me, and the rebels forgot about me.
It soon became dark, and my stomach rumbled with hunger. I was scared to be alone in the big, wide kitchen, so I ran out into the street.
That night, I spent the night wandering the streets. Perhaps you can call it a kind of runaway, since I can remember, I have never been so far away from home alone, much less late at night. I was ashamed of growing up in such a reactionary family and decided to leave, to break with my parents who were enemies of the people. As night fell, I didn’t know where I was going, I was penniless and walked around the streets in a daze, going where the crowds were and where the fun was. This night, the strange and strange encounter, to a clear account, it is not easy. The street was brightly lit, and in the square in the center of the city, the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team was performing a live newspaper drama in turn, and what left me with the most vivid memory was a lively and light-hearted Tianjin quick story. At that time, nothing was more suitable for street propaganda than the fast-paced book, in which the storyteller wore a big nose and played Liu Shaoqi, and at every turn came the line, “Mention Liu Shaoqi, he is not a good thing. The words have to be said in the original Tianjin dialect to be interesting, and the fast board crackles and pops, and the audience listens while having fun.
Not far away, the rebels were debating impassionedly, you say, I say, endlessly. Revolution is not a dinner invitation, revolution is a fight and a quarrel. At that time, the large-scale martial arts struggle had not yet begun, and the debaters were arguing with each other, and from time to time, we heard people shouting, “Let’s have a civil struggle, not a martial arts struggle!” The civil combat is to reason, but speaking about it, it is not reasonable, sleeves up, fists up. Looking to fight, somehow, and suddenly do not fight, the two sides shake hands and talk peace, and then continue to fight with the third party, a big fight. One side said something very good, and the other side shouted good shit. The square is full of “good enough” and “good enough”, and no one wants to show weakness. I have never understood what is the focus of the “good enough” and “good fart” debate, the “good enough” faction later called the “good “The “good” faction and the “fart” faction were the two major rebel groups in Nanjing, both of which had produced some very big names. The “good” faction and the “fart” faction were the two major rebel groups in Nanjing, both of which had produced some great figures.
That long night can be divided into two parts, the first half of the night is directly related to the revolution, the second half of the night and the revolution is somewhat distant. As the night got deeper and deeper, monkey jugglers, dog poultices sellers, and rice peddlers all emerged in suspicious shapes. The monkey juggler was counting down an honest monkey, just like teaching his own children, and several adults were watching with interest, laughing as they watched. Selling dog skin plaster began to sell homemade soap, blowing the ceiling, the oil and dirt to a white cloth rubbed, and then live cleaning to the audience to see, attracted the people watching admiration. The beggar was counting the money he earned, spreading the coins one by one on the empty steps, counting them over and over again. Deep in the shade, surprisingly, there was a man in the cultural revolution. I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, but wondered why it was so complicated for him to pee.
When I revisit this night, there is always a sense of absurdity, even I think it is not real, but it is true that I saw it with my own eyes. A bunch of little bums banded together and cheated me out of my new plastic sandals with little effort. They were my new pals, and we played together in the square, from east to west, and from south to north, and soon became little comrades who could say anything. Late at night, the crowd in the square gradually dispersed, the hustle and bustle of the past, I seemed to have found the organization, naturally become one of them. This group of small tramps solemnly accepted me and began to talk to me, coaxing me, a nine-year-old child’s heart and soul, too many beautiful imaginations about the future. Colorful soap bubbles were flying in the air, and I easily believed their promises that they could really take me to Beijing to meet the great leader, Chairman Mao. The guy at the head was a cripple, an eloquent linguistic genius who claimed to be a descendant of the old Red Army and had been personally received by Chairman Mao and had shaken his hand. I was so convinced of this guy’s story that every word he said struck me, and I respected whatever he said as if it were a god. Finally he gave me the order to lie down and sleep on the big platform in front of the bank like the other little bums, and he told me to take off my sandals and put them under my head as a pillow, reasoning that it would be less likely to be stolen.
I sleepily took off my plastic sandals and put them under my head, and fell into a beautiful sleep. In the honey-like dream, I dreamed that I, like the adult Red Guards, had climbed the mountain and waded through the water to finally reach the center of the world revolution and meet Mao Zedong, the reddest, reddest Red Sun in people’s hearts. My shoes were squeezed off, and everyone was crowded forward barefoot, until I reached the front, and there were all kinds of shoes lying on the street that had been squeezed off.
When I woke up, it was already dawn. For a while I didn’t understand how I could be lying on the street. I had rolled from one end of the platform to the other. My shoes were gone, and so were my new little homeless comrades.
In the end, I was walking home barefoot. I was fooled by the new bums, and the revolutionary friendship I had just built up was trashed in the blink of an eye. They stole my sandals and gleefully fled, evaporating like water on a beach. My disappearance alarmed the local police station and disturbed the rebels, who were responsible for my disappearance. My parents were still locked up in the cowshed, and with a half-grown child so unaccountably missing, the rebels were clearly aware of the seriousness of the problem and were splitting up to look for me. They were worried that I would be taken by traffickers and fall into the wrong hands. Everyone was overjoyed by my appearance, especially the female disciples, who had broken with my mother, but still had some remnants of the master-disciple relationship. They welcomed me like a returning hero, gave me a good meal, then gathered around me and asked me where I had left my shoes. I stammered about what had happened to me, more or less adding to the story, and they listened with amazement. For them, it was just a scare, just lost a pair of shoes, shoes lost, the child is still there, it is already a blessing in misfortune.
When I had eaten and drunk enough, a beautiful young actress came gallantly and took me away from my mother’s female disciples. She was the head of the rebellion, the commander of the corps, wearing a grass green uniform and an authentic military belt. At that time, the rebels were all dressed like this, not many people could really wear the real military uniform. She was wearing a real military uniform, and this line alone was enough to make people look at her. At that time, there were all kinds of military uniforms, most of which were imitations, and some were even dyed by themselves with rags, which were inexplicably green, and after washing, they were as dirty as camouflage uniforms because of fading. A real soldier’s uniform, in those special times, had an unusual meaning, it represented a person’s identity, represented a status.
The little rebel leader was in a relationship with an active duty soldier, and the uniform she was wearing was the man’s, which was a little bigger on her, but still looked good. I think the most visually striking and evocative scene of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution is the green uniform with the red armband. There is a folk saying “red with green, ugly to cry”, in Nanjing dialect “green” and “cry” together, not only rhymes, but also catchy. Red and green in color contrast, both sharp conflict, but also very harmonious. In a sea of green, the red armbands are as brilliant as flowers. The little leader in military uniform with red armbands looked serious and walked straight up to us, announcing with great dignity.
“Well, you may now hand this little fellow over to me, and I have something to say to him.”
The female disciples were immediately silent, and seemed to have understood what she was going to say to me, and looked at me, and then at her.
I didn’t know what she was going to say, but I had a feeling that something unfortunate was going to happen, so I looked at the disciples reluctantly and obediently went with her. The conversation that followed was no less powerful for a nine-year-old than a home invasion. She took me to a place where no one was around, looked around, and announced to me, both excitedly and mysteriously, that you were not born to your present parents. You are just an adopted child, she said, and you are not related to your current parents at all. I couldn’t believe what my ears were hearing; it was a bolt from the blue for me. Nothing could be more serious than that. Looking at my astonished look, she gloated a bit and comforted me with a pleasant smile, saying that this is actually a great thing, you should be happy, why, because you are not the child of bad people. The dragon gives birth to the dragon, the phoenix gives birth to the phoenix, the son of a mouse will make a hole. The old son hero child good man, she then said a more surprising secret, she said you know, in fact, you are the descendant of a revolutionary martyr, your father is a long-standing old revolutionary, for the people’s heroic sacrifice, has been long in the ground.
I did not believe what the rebels said, and there was no way not to believe it. Suddenly, her eyes were full of tears, as if she had been moved by something. I stared at her dumbfounded. More than twenty years later, near the beautiful West Lake, at the revolutionary martyrs’ cemetery, I saw the tombstone of my own father, and the answer to the secret that had puzzled me for decades was finally solved. I can’t describe how I felt at that time, whether I was happy, or unhappy, painful, or numb. For a nine-year-old, what was happening in front of me was too extreme, so extreme that it was unbelievable. Suddenly, your wonderful and happy family was raided, and your parents became unforgivable sinners, reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries. And then all of a sudden, the people who were closest to you in your life were not your real parents again. I can’t remember how this conversation ended, except that the little head of the rebellion never treated me as an outsider from beginning to end. She instigated the hatred between me and my adoptive parents, kept comforting me, encouraging me, telling me to stand up for myself, to be like a descendant of a revolutionary martyr, to be worthy of my own father who died for the revolution. She said that you have the support of Chairman Mao, the Party and the people are on your side and will be your strong backing, what else can you worry about. She said you should be a revolutionary seed, to be scattered anywhere, can take root and sprout, thrive, and eventually will bloom bright flowers to.
A few days later, at the end of class, a classmate imitated my parents’ parade in front of the crowd. He was my best friend and climbed onto the desk, playing the role of my father and my mother. He said we all thought your family was great, everyone was a person, but I never thought your family was bad, your father was a bad person, your mother was a worse bad person. Your father is a big rightist, your mother is not a sister Jiang, she is Fu Zhigao. I heard the girls eating and laughing, the little girl who occupied an important place in my heart, the little girl who represented a good ideal, also gloated and mixed in the crowd. My mother had been her idol, but now the virtual idol had collapsed, the heroic figure had ceased to exist, the revolutionary martyr Jiang Sister had been replaced by the traitor Fu Zhigao. The children’s game soon came to a climax when the little girl raised her fist and everyone suddenly chanted the slogan “Down with my parents” in one impassioned voice.
My eyes burst into tears, as if I had been betrayed by my beloved, a sadness that had never been felt before, gripped my heart. I wanted to pull the girl aside and tell her the secret of my life. I want to tell her that I am still the descendant of revolutionary martyrs and that my real father is still a heroic figure. But I don’t have the courage to do so, and even if I did, would she believe me? I didn’t believe she would, because I didn’t even really believe it myself. It was a fierce time, when revolution was the top priority, when revolution was everything, when any other child, in my position, should have been ridiculed, should have been cursed.
The revolution was heaven, and the counter-revolution should go to hell.
Postscript: I have always abhorred the eight model plays, and I do not want to hear its voice again on any occasion. When I think about it, “Sister Jiang” is also 50 steps ahead of the model play. After ten years of the Cultural Revolution, “Jiang Sister”, which was once banned, was performed again. It was a grand affair, with people lining up to buy tickets and scrambling to be the first, as if they had returned to the eve of the Cultural Revolution after a nightmare. The audience was the same as before, and history had come full circle and returned to the original point again. In many people’s minds, the re-enactment of classic plays such as “Sister Jiang” and “Honghu Red Guard” signaled the end of an era of terror. To be honest, this is one thing that I have never understood. I couldn’t understand it, and today’s young people probably can’t understand it even more. The Cultural Revolution was a long process that cannot be clearly explained in a few words. Different people have different cultural revolutions in their minds. Although the play was once banned, the concept it represented was, to put it bluntly, a solid foundation for launching the Cultural Revolution. With this ideological education, it was actually very easy to get the people to accept the Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution began, I was a nine-year-old Mao child, an elementary school student, and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, I was almost twenty years old and working as a pincer in a street factory. There is no doubt that I belong to the generation that grew up in that era, and it is impossible for my worldview not to carry the deep imprint of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps the imprint is too deep, and to this day, I always have a kind of doubt, which is whether the Cultural Revolution has ended.
Recent Comments