I was born in Shenyang, under the South Tower, in a research compound on Culture Road. Since the establishment of this research compound in 1953, it has been, in a sense, in a “closed” state. It is said to be closed because the entire compound is isolated from the outside world by a one-person-high brick wall, with half of the area inside being the work area and the other half being the Family residential area. The employees work in the institute every day, and the activities of the families are basically in the compound. Outside the compound, on the east and west sides, there are two not-so-small stores, which supply the daily needs of the more than 3,000 employees and their families in the compound. There is also an infirmary in the hospital, so that minor illnesses can be treated without leaving the hospital. Our “neighbors” in this research institute are also self-contained units: there are several universities and colleges, as well as the Army General Hospital and the Air Force Command, which are also separated from the outside world by high walls and do not have much communication with each other.
We, the children born in research institutes, grew up in such an “isolated” environment and naturally formed a child’s world corresponding to the adult world. The work of the staff was conducted in research rooms, and when they needed to identify themselves, they would say: I am from Room 1, Room 3, Room 8, etc. In contrast, the activities of our children were the same as those of the adults. In contrast, our children’s activities are divided into residential buildings, each of which is a “fortress”, and because these residential buildings are clearly marked with building numbers on the side, children in different residential buildings use the building number they live in as their “unit”. name. When they first met each other, they would ask each other: Which building are you from? The answer was: 1 building, 3 buildings, 12 buildings, and so on.
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, there were 20 staff dormitory buildings in our compound, most of which were 3-story, 2-door, 12-unit red brick buildings. It is said that they were designed according to the Soviet style at that Time. Except for buildings 12 and 13, which were one-unit, 3-bedroom senior research buildings – dormitories for senior researchers – the rest of the buildings were all 2-room or 1-room units. Our compound, which is shared by two research institutes, has 20 dormitory buildings belonging to each of the two institutes. In this way, the children knew each other not only by the word “building” but also by the word “institute.
The name of building 12, where I lived, was a high research building, and it had a special meaning to other children, as long as they reported the building number, they would have an initial impression of your family status and even social status. They were all people in their 30s, and each family had several children. These children joined the group of children in Building 12 and gave us a little more “power” in front of the other “buildings”.
My clear memory of this children’s world began at the age of six, when the Ninth National Congress was held and the chaos brought about by the Cultural Revolution began to settle down, and I was able to play outside the building more freely. At that time, children of “good birth” and children of “bad birth” could also play together in each building.
During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, except for going out with my grandfather and grandmother to buy vegetables, I was always alone at Home. The world outside was very chaotic, and our origins were not good, and we belonged to the category of cattle, ghosts and snakes, so the adults did not dare to let me go outside to play. There was an old lady in building 1 who had been the young wife of a large family and had no children, so she lived with her nephew’s family in her old age. This nephew, due to “historical problems”, was also included in the dictatorship. As soon as she left the house, a group of children would gather around her and shout: “Landlady, little wife! ……
The situation in the institute improved after 1969, but I could only play in front of my house and did not dare to go to other buildings besides the 12 buildings.
Each of our 20 family dormitories had its own characteristics. In addition to the design of the buildings, the “fame” of the members living there gives each building a unique “color”. It may not be obvious to outsiders who visit, but in the eyes of us kids, each building has its own system and its own style. The closest buildings to our 12 are 1 and 13, and 1 is a three-story building with 18 units, 2 doorways and 2 bedrooms, facing the main entrance of the Institute. The only portrait of the Great Leader in the Institute during the Cultural Revolution was in front of this building. All the residential buildings in our compound are north-south oriented, some are facing south, such as buildings 8, 9, 12 and 13, while others are facing north, such as buildings 1, 2, 3 and 4. From the beginning of my memory of Building 1, its name was connected with a “rogue family”.
I never met the Parents of this family, and I don’t know if they were the staff of the compound. This family is famous, not because of the parents, but because they have some “remarkable” children. The family has three boys and one girl. The oldest boy was called “Old Eye”, the middle one was called “Old Third”, the younger boy was called “Old Very”, and the girl was the youngest, a few years younger than me. The girl was the youngest, a few years younger than me, and was logically called the “old girl”. It is said that the “old eyes (sound) son” and a brother, but does not seem to live here, so I never knew his true face. The children in our courtyard, no one does not know the four brothers, although most people do not know their real names, and even the last name does not know, but once they mention their nicknames, absolutely everyone knows.
This family is a bully in building 1, but also the compound is a number of “trouble”. I don’t know what they did, but almost all the kids were afraid of them and didn’t dare to play around Building 1. When I was a little girl, the oldest of the family was about 16 or 7 years old, the middle boy was 13 or 4, and the younger one was 11 or 12. I had witnessed the younger brother and sister bullying process, a very vicious look, foul language on the mouth, hands and feet to teach other children. The rumors about them in the world of the children of the compound were so vicious that for many years, I was afraid to go near a building, and even passing by their door of that building, I had to see if no one was there. Because his door always gathered a pile of small hooligans look like a half-grown boy, very scary. If they are in, I would rather go around farther than to walk past them.
Later, when I grew to 12 or 13 years old, out of curiosity about the brothers, I became the playmate of the “old girl”. For a while, almost every day after school, go to play with her. I also borrowed a forbidden book (I forget the title) from her little brother, “Old Even”. The close proximity to them has removed my fear of them, and the mystery is naturally gone. In fact, they are not so bad, probably like the TV series “Scarlet Romance” in the compound of those teenagers, youth and energy are wasted in the building door hanging around and fighting. Years later, when I talked to a good friend’s older brother (also a son of our compound, three years older than me) about borrowing books, he actually glared at me and said, “How dare you borrow books from him? It can be seen that these teenagers in our compound among the children, really “powerful” reputation.
Such “little bullies” as the brothers in Building 1, there are other residential buildings, especially in those buildings for the low-level workers. Although their “fame” is not as loud as that of the brothers in Building 1, but it is enough to make the children of other buildings to stay away. After I was in elementary school, I often encountered these bad boys on my way to and from school every day. Since our school was outside the Institute, and the Institute was separated by a small river, we, the children of the Institute, had to gather at the west gate of the Institute every day, as a class, and then walk together for 10 minutes across the bridge to school. After school, the class returned to the west gate and was dismissed and returned to their homes. From our house to the west gate, this is where I was often “harassed”. On the way to and from school, I was often unlucky enough to run into those bad guys, and was either cursed with bad words or chased by stones. This state of affairs lasted for years, making me nervous all day long. At that time, my parents were the target of the “dictatorship”, and the parents of these bad guys were in a leading position of the “working class”, so I did not dare to tell my parents about these things, because I knew it would be useless to sue. Not only will it not solve the actual problem, but it is likely to make the problem bigger and more serious, turning into a “crisis” in our family. This was the environment I lived in throughout my childhood until the end of the Cultural Revolution, when the sky was turned back over and I was able to live a normal Life.
I went from childhood to adolescence when the whole society was extremely turbulent and materially deprived. In those days, children did not have toys at home and did not have much homework after school (and even if they did, many of them did not write), so the only thing they could do after school was to hang out. So playing outdoors was the basic form of play in our childhood. At that time, we had many kinds of games, all in the form of group participation, and it took several people to complete. Girls jumped on rubber bands and hopscotch (drawing a grid on the ground, throwing small tiles with broken bricks into the grid, and then jumping in the grid with one leg while kicking the small tiles to the next grid). My mother once said that in the Republic of China, the girls also played this and jumped in almost the same way as we do. Although more than three people can play rubber band jumping, most of the time five or six people, or even seven or eight people play together. When you jump, you have to sing a song and dance to the rhythm of the song. I can still remember one of them.
Jiang sister Jiang sister good Jiang sister, you spilled blood for the people.
Fu Zhigao Fu Zhigao Fu Zhigao, you are the people’s dog bandit, dog bandit ……
This is what the crap words, I do not know who made it up, but at the time we all sang with great pleasure, no children have objections.
The girls jumped on the bandwagon, jumped on the house, the boys bounced glass balls, fanned cigarette paper, and played “piece of chi”, and also several children got together to play. When I was a kid, I was a bratty character, plus the 12 buildings of similar age children, is more male than female, so I did not participate in these little boys’ games.
The glass ball is dug on the land four or five small pits, and then the small glass ball from a meter away to a small pit bounce, accurate, the one who misses less is the winner. The winter in the northeast is very cold, bouncing the ball when the hand out of the cotton gloves, less than a minute to freeze stiff. In order to reduce mistakes, before playing, everyone put the thumb and forefinger that hold the ball to the mouth, and desperately breathe. A small black hand, uniformly standard ha-qi action, as part of the childhood game memories, it all remained in my mind forever.
The game of fanning cigarette paper is easy to play as there are no restrictions on the venue. It is the leftover cigarette cartons of paper smoked by adults, folded into a triangular shape, placed on the ground with the hand fan. If you can fan the cigarette paper from one side to the other side, you win. Not one fan, is a few together fan, and not easy yo. You can fan over, how much is yours. Such a game, the winner has a sense of victory.
Play “piece of strange” is also similar, but is the use of hard paper instead of cigarette paper, square and round on a variety of paper, but also covered with red, blue, black, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun and some other historical figures of the head of the print. Play, with a round piece of paper to another piece of paper, hit it overturned even if you win, this one was turned over to the winner.
In addition to the above, there are also some running group games, grab the flag, hide and seek, fight, and so on. All these games required participants to run around the residential buildings. In those days, the front and back of the building was spacious and open, either a chicken coop or a corn field, which reserved enough space for such group games to be played at any time as long as there were enough people.
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, our compound carried out an activity called “Xiang Yang Compound”. This was an important national effort to “put the dictatorship of the proletariat into practice at the grassroots level” and to make the class struggle prominent in every residential compound (a movie called “The Story of Xiangyang Courtyard” was made at that time). But in our case, the purpose of this activity became, in the eyes of our children, to make each dormitory building take care of its own environment and to increase the number of amateur sports settings. I didn’t see any other changes after the event started, but there was a ping pong table made of rotten bricks next to our 12 dormitory buildings, and we kids had a new sport game. I remember that at the meeting when the Sunward Compound was established, the host wrote a couplet.
Xiang Yang Compound has a bright future
Socialism shines brightly all over the world
The venue was in front of the statue of Mao Zedong in the compound, each building had to send someone to attend, I followed the adults and also attended the meeting.
Not every building had such a ping pong table, and this facility attracted many children from other buildings to play. To this day, I still enjoy playing ping pong, and I have a regular table tennis case at home, which is set up in the backyard in the summer when the weather is nice, and the whole family plays together. It all has to do with the experience of being a teenager. This compound, which was aimed at “fighting the class struggle”, nurtured a sporting hobby in me.
Each of the two institutes in our compound had its own auditorium. In those days, the auditorium was not only a place for staff meetings, but also a place for film screenings and performances. Although there were only eight model plays and a few movies like “Mine War” and “Tunnel War” that could be shown in those days, for us kids, the auditorium was a dream place in life.
The auditorium of our institute, located outside the work area and in front of the dormitory area, is a large auditorium with 40 rows of seats, 30 seats in each row. The ceiling is three stories high from the ground, and a row of large windows on each of the left and right sides are placed very close to the ceiling, so people feel spacious and have good air circulation when they sit inside. Before each screening, the management will close the glass windows outside a layer of wooden windows to ensure the darkness of the auditorium. The 10 seats in the middle of the first nine rows of the auditorium are leather chairs, while the rest of the chairs are all wooden. Our family lived on the third floor, and when we looked out of our bedroom window, we could see the top part of the auditorium wall, and the bottom part, which was blocked by the Institute’s cafeteria.
In those days, there were few buildings in the institute that did not have slogans painted on their walls, and an auditorium of this size would be no exception. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the slogan I saw on the high wall of the auditorium was “Down with Li x” (our director), and later it became “We must liberate Taiwan“. “After the fall of the Gang of Four, there was a new spirit above, and all the slogans on the building had to be removed. As a result, the “We must liberate Taiwan” in front of me was painted with a layer of white ash, but unfortunately, the white ash was not thick enough, and the words below were still clearly visible. Until we moved in the Spring Festival of 1981, the words “Liberation of Taiwan” were still hidden there.
Our auditorium was a small movie theater before the Cultural Revolution, and when I was a small child, I was carried by my family to watch movies in it. The movie “Sea Eagle” starring Wang Xinguang left my first impression of Chinese cinema, and after the Cultural Revolution, these old movies were replayed and I could recall many of the episodes. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, movies were no longer shown in the auditorium, but were replaced by scenes of people fighting, and there was a meeting of the whole institute to expose and criticize, and we children attended the meeting. I don’t remember the content of the process at all, all that remains in my mind are the people standing on the stage with the signs. After the eight model plays were made into movies, our auditorium began to show movies again. The first movie I watched was “The Wisdom of the Mountain”. This was probably in the late sixties and early seventies. I didn’t like to watch the model opera, I couldn’t understand the Peking Opera, and the dance drama was mute and didn’t speak, so it was not interesting. Of course, it is better than nothing, at least there are still images. From that time on, movies came into my life, and the auditorium became a place I often patronized.
In the mid-70s, the compound, like the rest of the country, launched a campaign to learn from Xiao Jinzhuang. This small village was famous for singing model plays, criticizing Lin and criticizing Confucius and engaging in poetry contests. It was a so-called typical example of Jiang Qing’s “ideological revolution” in the countryside, which was widely publicized throughout the country. In our research institute, every research office had to “sing and dance” to carry out the campaign. The employees of each research laboratory took turns to rehearse in the auditorium, and everyone had to participate. Such a form of campaign was the same as today’s “Singing Red”, which was an ideological campaign for the masses. At that time, we, the elementary school students, would go to the auditorium in groups after school to watch the “performance”. The adults’ dance moves, which were not professional at all, were hard to watch and ridiculous. If we found a classmate’s parents were also on stage to “make a fool of themselves”, we would laugh. I remember when the chorus included “The Cultural Revolution is good” and “The Red Sun, shining in the heart, united to fight ……”. At that time, listening to the stage, the most disgusting is to hear the “proletarian cultural revolution, is good! That’s good! It is good ……”. The three lines of the song “is good” gave me the feeling that it was very brutal, very violent, very annoying and disgusting from the heart. At that time, I was already a teenager and had the ability to think about some simple issues. The most simple emotion in my heart was hate for what happened to my family during the Cultural Revolution and the persecution of my father. I would never agree that the Cultural Revolution was good. This kind of movement, which did not focus on production and professional research, and everyone spent their energy and time on “nonsensical” performances, was a great waste of social resources!
The auditorium of the neighboring institute was very close to ours, about 200 meters away. During the Cultural Revolution, our auditorium was the only one that could show movies. “Only after the fall of the Gang of Four did the neighboring institute convert its auditorium into a qualified movie theater. My first memory of the auditorium in the neighborhood came from a story told by my best friend’s older brother: at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, an old underground worker in the neighborhood committed suicide by jumping off a building while being isolated and censored, right next to the auditorium. Speaking years later, the brother still remembered it vividly and felt “disgusting”. Influenced by his account, I also rarely go to play near the neighboring auditorium, whenever I walk to the edge, I will think about the dead. Although not witnessed, the vivid description, but also let me remember in my heart, enough to remember half a lifetime.
In those days, the life of the compound workers was not easy, and the “cattle and ghosts” were even very painful. The world of the children of the compound, although not as gray as the adults, but also inevitably with a deep imprint of the times. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the market. Compared to the children of the 21st century, our upbringing was not in the living room, and we did not have the coddling of our elders. The innocence and childishness that remained under the political oppression was accompanied by the bitter haze that lingered. We, the children of the Cultural Revolution, especially the sons and daughters of the “untouchables” in the category of “cattle, ghosts, snakes and gods”, all had an unspeakable hatred buried in our hearts after we became adults. With such psychological scars, we face the reality of life with much more effort than those who grew up in normal society. This is the price that has to be paid after going through the Cultural Revolution.
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