I
In the evening of June 30, 1966, I was told that there were large-character posters of me in the auditorium, and I went to the auditorium after dinner to read them. The auditorium was full of large-character posters denouncing me, and it became my special room for large-character posters. I read through them one by one, the big words were written in crooked and white letters, and the tone was very fierce. But there are many chicken scratch things, but few important things. Only one large-character poster, jointly written by three members of the department’s general branch, carried the most weight, exposing my opposition to the Central Cultural Revolution and my advocacy of Khrushchev, as evidenced by my handwritten articles and the lesson plans I had used. I was caught out. I came out of the auditorium and rode my bike straight to the water park. I needed to calmly think of a countermeasure to get myself out of the danger. On the way, I couldn’t help reciting Zhang Yuangan’s “He Xinlang”: “Dreaming about the road to God’s country. I was disappointed with the autumn breeze, even the camp painted corner, the old palace away from the millet. The bottom of the matter Kunlun pouring pillar, nine places yellow flow chaotic injection? Gather a thousand villages of foxes and rabbits. It is difficult to ask about the will of God, but it is difficult to tell when people are old and sad. ……” Probably because the words matched my state of mind at that Time, they came out naturally from the bottom of my heart. I recited it aloud, not afraid that the Red Guards would hear it. It doesn’t matter if they can hear it, they don’t understand it anyway. I rode to the water park, leaned my bike against a willow tree, and sat myself down by the river. I had to think about how to deal with it when I was caught out. I decided on two things, first to protect myself, and second to do no harm and try to help others. I had long lost my fervor for the “supreme directive,” not only my fervor but also my blind obedience.
On October 1, 1949, the founding ceremony was held, and I was glad to see it. As our school parade passed through Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong stood on the Tiananmen Tower and shouted, “Long live the comrades of Shidai High School!” My blood boiled at the sound of that and I was willing to sacrifice everything for him. I was the backbone of all kinds of movements that followed. It was not until the purge in 1955 that I began to learn to think with my own head. At that time, I was the head of the materials group. Although I was the head of the group, my position was very important, and we had to organize all the materials for criticizing the purges. Soon I had my first confrontation with the leader of the group. He wanted to designate a 17-year-old cook as a counter-revolutionary. The cook’s crime was that he often performed “reactionary programs” in the kitchen to amuse everyone. He started by saying a quick phrase: “The Eighth Route Army is hanging around, with broken shoes and socks, broken uniforms, broken bullets and broken guns. After saying that, someone asked him: Who are you? He said: I am the second Chiang Kai-shek. Those who listened laughed and sometimes asked him to do it again. When we went to investigate after receiving the report, he performed it again happily, without any fear. The person in charge said he was an active counter-revolutionary and asked me to organize his materials. I said he was a backward young man, two hundred and fifty. How can any counter-revolutionary openly say he is the second to Chiang Kai-shek? This young man was from a poor peasant Family, usually worked hard and was well liked. I strongly disagreed to organize his materials, and the person in charge gave in. He was not designated as a counter-revolutionary when I was the head of the material team, but I don’t know what his future fate would be.
Later I had a few more conflicts with the person in charge. He often distorted the materials we had compiled when exposing the targets of the purge at meetings, adding many things that were not in the materials. I approached the person in charge and pointed out that many of the things he said were not in the materials. He said he would pay attention to it in the future. Instead of “paying attention”, he intensified his efforts, adding more and more things and making them more and more sensational. I asked him if he wanted to be truthful, not based on the investigation of the material to expose indiscriminately is not the same as harming people? He was on fire, saying that I had always been right-leaning, standing on the side of the enemy, unsuitable for the important work of organizing materials. Soon I was removed.
I was also suspicious of the material exposing Hu Feng based on my own experience. To draw conclusions from a few sentences in the letter is likely to be taken out of context. For example, “He said that the Kuomintang called the Communist Party a communist bandit”, but by removing “the Kuomintang called” or changing it to an abridged version, it became “he said the Communist Party was a communist bandit”. This kind of tactic has been used since ancient times, and is a common tactic of the rulers to persecute the literati, why has it resurfaced in the new China? Soon afterwards, the “Mingliang” and the ensuing struggle against the rightists began. My family told me not to talk nonsense and not to put up big-character posters. I said that many people had a point and that they were pointing out the shortcomings in their work out of love for the Communist Party so that they could correct them, so what was wrong with that? My brother-in-law sternly said that I was a flower in a greenhouse and did not understand the class struggle. All three of my brothers-in-law came from Yan’an, and two of them participated in the Long March and were leading cadres of the army. The old cadres all had the experience of being rectified, so they were very cautious in what they said. For example, I once asked one brother-in-law how Peng Boshan could be a Hu Feng member, and he only replied, “Peng Boshan had fought in the war.” The answer was not what was asked. In fact, it expressed his attitude toward Peng Boshan. Several teachers in my high school also came from Yan’an Lu Yi and told me a lot about the inside story of the Yan’an Rectification. The contents were those disclosed by Wei Junyi in the “Book of Thought and Pain”, but people who had not been to Yan’an in the early 1950s did not know about it, and those who did would not talk about it. Naturally, I had a few more question marks in my head than my peers. These teachers of mine probably did not learn enough during the Yan’an period, did not learn a lesson, spoke casually, and were classified as rightists in 1957.
I listened to my brothers-in-law and didn’t put up a single big-character poster during the release period. When the students asked me to join the strike, I persuaded them not to strike and said that I would go to class alone if you didn’t go. I did pretty well, but I was still close to being classified as a rightist. The reason was that I did not actively participate in the anti-rightist movement and could not draw a line with rightists. I never spoke at the criticism meetings, and after the meetings, I was still hanging out with the rightists. The secretary thought that I resisted the anti-right movement in my heart and was a rightist without rightist speech. But my father, Lan Gongwu, protected me in the dark. In September 1957, just as the whole country was classifying rightists, my father died. In order to demonstrate the Party’s attitude toward intellectuals: to unite and respect revolutionary and progressive intellectuals, and to resolutely combat anti-Party and anti-socialist intellectuals, the Party held a grand memorial meeting for my father at Zhongshan Hall in Zhongshan Park in Beijing, with Liu Shaoqi officiating and Dong Biwu posthumously recognizing my father as a member of the Communist Party on behalf of the Party Central Committee. Under such circumstances, it was inconvenient for the school party committee to classify me as a rightist.
In 1956 I also read Khrushchev’s secret report “On the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences” and was astonished. In the mid-1950s there was a group of Chinese who had returned from the Soviet Union, mostly members of the UCP, and I often went to their place in order to practice speaking. During casual conversations, they told me that the “Red Kongs” (or Gebow, the predecessor of the KGB) were very powerful. After the Zhang Gufeng incident in 1938, all the black-haired people in Vladivostok, except The Japanese, were arrested and censored. Some of them were put in Krasnoyarsk concentration camp. Mr. Zeng, who was twenty years older than me, spent seventeen years in there. When I asked him what crime he had committed, he said it was because his hair was black. The Zhang Gubeng incident was instigated by the Japanese, but the Japanese civilians living in Vladivostok were safe and were only sent back Home, and Stalin didn’t dare to mess with the Japanese. Mr. Zeng and I were very close and told me many horrifying stories about the labor camps. I was half convinced, but only after reading Khrushchev’s secret reports. The facts Khrushchev cited were not rumors, and I stopped blindly worshiping the Soviet Union.
Although I was not classified as a rightist, I could not stay in my original unit any longer, and when Shandong University came to ask for someone, I gladly went there. Once I arrived at Shandong University, I wore a big red flower and was gloriously sent down to work in the countryside at the foot of Laoshan Mountain. Here I ushered in the Great Leap Forward. It is hard for people who have not experienced the Great Leap Forward to imagine how ridiculous it was. For example, the commune decided to eradicate illiteracy, requiring everyone, including the elderly and women, to recognize 3,300 words within three days, without leaving production. On the fourth day, they went to the commune with gongs and drums to report their success. There are many more absurd examples than this. Our paid labor exercises were much better than reeducation through labor and labor reform, and at least no one died of hunger. But the feeling of man-made disasters was just as strong, and the ideals of our youth dissipated, and we no longer worshiped authority.
II
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I was taken out and put into a cattle shed. Probably because of my good background and young age, I was appointed as the leader of the cattle and ghosts team, and I led 17 or 18 cattle and ghosts (mostly old teachers) to work every day. Before setting out, they sang in unison: “I am a cow, a ghost, a snake and a god, I am a cow, a ghost, a snake and a god, I am guilty to the people. The people are dictating to me, so I have to be honest. If I am not honest, smash me to pieces. Smash, smash, smash!” I commanded quickly, and immediately after the song took them to the most remote corner of the campus to pull weeds. I said to them that we should stay away from the Red Guards, we can sit and lie down, but if the Red Guards are coming, squat up quickly.
If the Red Guards bickered in the classroom over the study of how to implement Chairman Mao’s great strategic plan and left us alone, the day would be peaceful. But such a clean day was becoming increasingly rare. One day, the Red Guards escorted the whole school to the auditorium to criticize the bullies and snakes, and the vast procession passed by the place where we were pulling weeds, and the Red Guards yelled at us, “Get in!” We hurriedly got up from the grass and joined the ranks of the bulls and devils. We were escorted into the auditorium. There was a row of papier-mache hats in the auditorium, and we were told to put them on ourselves. I immediately picked a shorter, glue-dried hat and put it on my head. For those who were slow or refused to wear it, the Red Guards gave them the tallest, freshly mudded hats, with the glue running from their heads to their jaws. Before going on stage to be criticized, the Red Guards brought a pot of blue ink and told us to draw a flower face before going on stage. I dipped my hands in the ink and smeared my forehead and cheeks blue, trying not to let the ink run into my eyes. An associate professor of the psychology department, instead of wiping, shouted, “You are destroying Chairman Mao’s policy by doing this.” Before the words left his mouth, the blue ink poured down from his head. I thought how he was so confused, Chairman Mao is the Red Guard’s red commander, the Red Guard is Chairman Mao’s red junior soldiers. When did Chairman Mao say you can’t pour ink on the head of a cow, ghost or snake? Much more serious than this, his old man did not say anything. Ink running into the eyes will hurt the eyes. I used my power as the captain of the Bull Ghost and Snake God and bellowed at him, “What’s your attitude toward the Red Guard juniors, and get out!” As he went out, I waved my finger in front of my eyes, signaling him to hurry up and wash his eyes. It was risky for me to do so. What authority did I have to tell the bully to leave the scene of the criticism? It turned out that the Red Guards came from all departments and were divided into factions, with no unified command. Everyone was in charge, and everyone was not. I told him to get lost, this faction does not care, and that faction did not care. I took advantage of the lack of unity in the leadership of the Red Guards. When the Red Guards were fighting against Mr. Chen, a professor of foreign languages, they asked him why he was cursing Chairman Mao’s early death. He replied that “Long live Chairman Mao” was a hypothetical expression in English, indicating that he wanted him to live a long Life, but one could not live 10,000 years. He was immediately beaten. He wanted to reason with the Red Guards, but I was already on the stage and couldn’t stop him, so I just watched him get beaten. This time it was a school-wide criticism meeting, with the secretary and principal in front of the top, although I was guilty of a serious crime, but only the Red Guards of the foreign language department knew about it, the Red Guards of other departments did not know, so they did not criticize me, I only counted as an accompaniment to the fight. But I saw the Red Guards beating people clearly and knew that I could not reason with them. In fact, Chairman Mao made this point very clear in his “Report on the Inspection of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”. However, many of our teachers do not understand this point, and still have to reason with the Red Guards, probably because they have not studied Mao’s works well.
III
My “status” in the foreign language department has been raised from a cow and a snake to an active counterrevolutionary (the Red Guards wrote “active” as “present”, which is also a common term. I was a teacher of Russian, but I was actually a hidden counter-revolutionary and finally showed my true form). The Red Guards criticized me, saying that I was Khrushchev’s filial son and grandson, and I admitted to them that I was, and that I was burnt to ashes. I bent over and did the “jet” in a standard and flawless way. So I spent less time fighting and more time with them. I had the opportunity to observe the Red Guards. I taught two fourth grade classes with forty students. The most vicious ones were only five or six. They all came from rural areas, from poor peasant families, and were the worst students in the two classes. One of the girls, the only party member in the two classes, had been squatting for three years. Because I had enough of her suffering, I still remember her name. She had a lisp and a big tongue. Russian had a trill that she couldn’t pronounce for four years. I used to tutor her at night, and I tried everything, such as using water to pronounce the trill, but to no avail. She also didn’t understand verbs. In first and second grade, she said that sleep was not a verb and how could she move when she was asleep. It took a teacher before me a long time to get her to understand that words that express states are also verbs. She was not fit to study Russian. For the sake of her future, I suggested to the General Secretary that she be transferred to the Department of Political Science and Education and become a political officer after graduation. The conversation I had with the secretary of the general branch was exposed and became a major crime for my persecution of students from peasant and worker families. A few other students from rural areas did slightly better than this girl and did not squat in class. But they couldn’t remember the vocabulary and couldn’t figure out the grammatical conjugations. Most of them failed their exams, or barely scored three points. Their knowledge is narrow, or they don’t know anything except the Party’s propaganda slogans, and they are not ashamed of it, but rather proud of it. They can refute you in one sentence: those are the rags of feudalism, the more you know, the more reactionary. People always have the desire to express themselves, and they have nothing else to express but their family origins (using the verb “proud” in their sentences, their sentences are “I am proud of my glorious family origins”), and they can only express their fervent response to slogans and slogans. They judge everything according to a certain phrase or the policy of the Party in a certain period. Once I talked about the subway because it was being built in Beijing, and I said that London, New York and Moscow all had subways, and that Moscow’s was built later but was the most beautiful. A male student who failed the exam criticized me, saying that I had released poison and had no class consciousness. The subways in London and New York are for capitalists, and the subways in Moscow are for revisionists, but I said that their subways were built earlier than China’s, and that Moscow’s subways were the most beautiful. I immediately admitted that I said these things in a vain attempt to restore capitalism, to make China’s red flag fall to the ground, and to turn the country into a repair. I first put the outline on the highest, instead they could not show the ability to criticize me. Most of the students who grew up in Tianjin were different from them. Although they also put up big-character posters for me, the contents were copied from others’ big-character posters, and there were no new revelations. When I talked with them in class, I introduced Russian art and Music genres, Russian and Soviet writers, and even Shaulokhov, who had become a target of criticism. They did not expose any of this. They had sympathy in their hearts for me, and once when I was sweeping the floor, a student threw a paper ball into the dustpan. I opened it in an unoccupied place and saw that it read: Tonight the criticism may kneel, wear thicker pants. I admired his courage to tip off the current counter-revolutionaries. I was also comforted by the fact that not all young people’s revolutionary will is as hard as steel. When it came time to assign jobs after graduation in 1969, the girl who couldn’t pronounce her trill and several students with good grades stayed in Tianjin, while those with good grades were assigned to various counties in Hebei.
IV
I dug in my heels and tried to figure out how to push off two serious crimes: touting Khrushchev and attacking the Central Cultural Revolution. The former item could be pushed to the black line of education. I was teaching a report by Khrushchev based on a textbook approved by the Ministry of Education, and the lesson plan included words praising Khrushchev. I was poisoned by the black line of education and was a victim of it. The second item is difficult to deny because I wrote it in an article criticizing Yao Wenyuan for hitting the stick. Yao was a member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, so criticizing him was naturally an attack on the Central Cultural Revolution, and it was written in black and white. Although the article was written in 1958, Yao Wenyuan was not a great figure at that time. But can it be said?
My salary was withheld by the Red Guards, and I was only paid fifteen yuan a month for living expenses. Both my mother and wife told me to increase my nutrition, not to break my body, that the school Food was not good, so I could go out for extra meals, and that my wife would secretly send me money from Beijing. We met in a park at Tianjin North Station, like an underground worker meeting. Their suggestions coincided with mine. I hung my bull and snake sign on campus. Mine was small enough to be held sideways under my armpit, and from a distance it looked like I was holding a book. As soon as I left the campus I took it off and put it in my book bag. I went to a nearby restaurant with the historian Mr. Chia Man for dinner. His sign was large, so we cut it down the middle and sewed it on with a thin thread. Fold it up and put it in the school bag when we leave the school gate, and unfold it when we enter the school gate, so the Red Guards can’t see it. We ordered meat and drank beer and had a good time. But soon the Red Guards bumped into us and beat us up on the spot. I asked Mr. Lac if he still wanted to eat, but he said he would change the place and eat as usual. We went to a restaurant far away from the school to eat. Later, the Red Guards were busy fighting the war of factions, so they were much more relaxed about us. Mr. Lac began to study again, preparing for his later publication “The Economic History of the Song Dynasty”, and urged me to read many times, even asking me to prepare for writing a biography of Gogol. This, of course, could not be done, not to mention the lack of information and the fact that I never had the intention of writing a monograph, unlike him. He is a famous historian and has already published monographs such as “Wang Anshi’s Change of Law”. Reading is still possible. At night, living alone in the dormitory building, I began to read. The book I read was “Liaozhai Zhiyi” with three notes and three comments. It was lent to me by Mr. Han Wenyu, a close friend of Mr. Zhang Zhongxing. I had never read through Liaozhai in the past, but only a few pieces such as “Painted Skin”, “Taoist Priest of Laoshan” and “Promotion of Weaving”. When the night was over, the Red Guards went to the revolution. I opened “Liaozhai” and gradually entered the world of ghosts and foxes created by Pu Songling. My favorite stories were the ones about the flower fairies, “Ge Scarf”, “Huang Ying” and “Xiang Yu”. I loved them so much that I copied them, and I copied them in a notebook with the inscription of Vice President Lin on the cover: “The sea sails by the helmsman”. Pu Songling opened up the beautiful world of ghosts and foxes for me, and his wonderfully touching words also fascinated me. Reading “Liaozhai” was the center of my life during that period, and I benefit from it to this day.
Five
I was living two lives. The reality of life was too much for me to bear, so I escaped into the world of ghosts and foxes. The ghost foxes gave me strength and seemed to increase my tolerance for the violent language of the loudspeaker broadcasts, but the heart disease did not go away. The charge of opposing the Central Cultural Revolution was still weighing on my heart like a weight. I slipped back to Beijing while the Red Guards were fighting a faction war. Together with my wife, I went to the Ministry of Education to read the big-character posters. Suddenly, I saw a large-character poster exposing how He Qifang had implemented a black line in literature and art, in which he was accused of opposing the Central Cultural Revolution. The large-character poster said that Yao Wenyuan had wanted to be transferred to the Institute of Literature before the Cultural Revolution, but He Qifang refused to accept it, saying that Yao Wenyuan had written strong words and beaten sticks, and that the Institute of Literature could not accept such a person. I read it and was pleased, but it was in no way gloating. I have no quarrel with He Qifang, not to mention that he is a Writer I admire. I especially admire his writing. I have all of his books, and I still have his 1936 book “Dreams of Painting” published by the Cultural Life Press. It is impossible to confirm whether or not He Qifang said such a thing, but he was a capitalist and was defeated anyway. But this large-character poster could be a lifesaver for me. I immediately copied it down and wrote a large rebellion poster with my wife overnight. He Qifang was a literary authority in the Party, and I was too much in admiration of him, fell under his poison, and, under his influence, wrongly attacked Comrade Yao Wenyuan. I touted Khrushchev as being poisoned by the black line of education, and attacked Comrade Yao Wenyuan as being poisoned by the black line of literature and art, which, though too poisoned, was still meant to be revolutionary, not a bull and snake god. I put the blame on the Ministry of Education and He Qifang. I did not add to He Qifang’s crimes by writing this, and the people in his task force would not be interested in the fact that an unknown person in Tianjin had been influenced by him, but doing so could possibly save me. After I wrote the big-character poster, I put it on the wall between the two Red Guards’ headquarters (Jinggang Mountain and August 18), and I revolted, liberating myself. Maybe I will be liberated, or maybe I will be criticized and driven back to the cowshed again. The former is more likely, because most Red Guards have no ill feelings towards me, and the few revolutionary juniors who hated me were not very clean when they raided the house and did not become the head. After the posting in the morning, I went to spy at noon, walking around in front of the big words to see the reaction of the red guards, there is no sign of criticism against me. In the afternoon, I went again, and one of the Red Guards called me “Old Blue”. I was flattered and felt that the rebellion had succeeded, and I had broken free from the cowshed. Years later, I heard from the Red Guards at the Jinggang Mountain Command that they had discussed my rebellion statement, and most of them thought that the finger should now be pointed at the capitalists and left me alone. I don’t know how the August 18 Command reacted.
Six
There is an article in “Liaozhai”, “The Bookworm”, about burning books. Lang Sheng loved to read and spent his days sarcastically, regardless of other things. He finally found Yan Ruyu in the book. Yan Ruyu asked him to burn all the books to save himself from the disaster, but Lang Sheng refused. The eunuch took Lang Sheng as a demon. “Seeing that the books and scrolls filled the house and were too many to be burnt, he burned them; the smoke knotted in the court did not disperse, and the haze was as dark as the haze.” This is the artistic fiction of Pu Songling. Burning books is not “smoke knot does not disperse” but the fire light rushed to the sky. One night in August, when we were studying, the Red Guards rushed in and ordered us to burn the books in the playground. When we arrived, the books were already on fire. I asked Lao Bao to pull the burning books with me, and I handed him a long stick, but he thought it was too long and picked a short one for himself, and I advised him not to listen. This short stick almost killed him. Old Bao was naturally an ox-ghost, he was much older than me, older than all ox-ghosts and snakes, eighty-two years old that year. He was one of the first students of Tsinghua to stay in the United States, and later served as the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Communications of the Beiyang Government. After the founding of New China, he had been managing the materials in the data room of the Department of Foreign Languages. Under the glass panel on his desk were photos of him feeding a plum deer during his stay in the United States. He was arrested because of these photos. Old Bao was short, only one meter six or so. He was holding a short stick to poke the fire and was burned by the flames. Behind him were the Red Guards, and in front of him was the fire. Backward will be beaten and scolded by the Red Guards, only forward to poke the fire. My stick is long, plucking fire can not burn themselves, want to exchange with him is no longer possible. When the book burned to ashes, water had to be doused, and I was responsible for fetching water. Each time the water is stolen to drink a lot of water. Old Bao has been roasted by the fire. The August weather was stifling, and an old man over eighty years old could not stand it, and finally collapsed on the ashes. Fortunately, the ashes had been doused with water by me, otherwise they would have been burned to death. The Red Guards scolded him for being lazy, but didn’t bother him anymore. After burning the book, I carried him back to the teaching room and put him on the table. On his chest, on his arms, he was burning with burns. I made him drink water and then drew a basin of cool water to wipe his body. He gradually eased up and said to me, “They’re all long bugs!” I helped him out of the school and called a tricycle to pull him home. People have the bottom line of being human, such as children can not hit their Parents, students can not hit teachers, courtesy to the elderly, love and care for the young. If the bottom line is breached, a person is not a person anymore. The Red Guards were all young and backward, so how could they not have any compassion for old Bao? I recall seeing a group of old women being escorted out of Beijing by Red Guards at the Beijing train station, wearing signs such as “Landlady” and “Capitalist’s Stinky Wife”, and some of them simply put their ingredients on their foreheads. Most of them were old residents of Beijing who had been expelled from the city because of their origins. They sat motionless on the ground, some of them with paralyzed legs, which was heartbreaking to see. The Red Guards, who had no sympathy for them, laughed and joked, especially the 15 and 16 year old girls who laughed even more. It broke my heart to see the flowers of the motherland look so proud.
Seven
After the Red Guards fought the war, they left us alone; not only the revolutionary teachers, but also the cattle, ghosts and snakes. By this time I had become a member of the people and joined the ranks of the revolutionary teachers. I sometimes returned to Beijing, and when I was in Tianjin, I read Lu Xun’s essays together with Mr. Han Wenyu. I started with the first volume, The Grave. I read it once or twice, and then sat on the mazar in front of his dormitory at night, discussing it with him and listening to his explanations. I was surprised by how well Mr. Han knew Lu Xun’s works. Not only was he familiar with each piece, he could even recite sentences and paragraphs. After Mr. Han finished his lecture, I went back and reread the pieces he had lectured on, and then read the following miscellaneous articles in order. In this way, we read through the sixth volume of “The Last Series of the Miscellaneous Writings of Hejieting”, reading each piece three or four times on average. Mr. Han graduated from Tsinghua University and knew a lot of interesting stories about professors from Peking University and Tsinghua University, so he also told me about them. Mr. Zhang Zhongshang wrote about the professors of Tsinghua University in his book, “Negative Pleasures and Trivia,” which he also heard from Mr. Han. Mr. Han also lent me works by Zhou Zuoren, Yu Dafu and Xu Zhimo, all of which were first editions, which opened my eyes. He told me to read Zhou Zuoren’s The Talons of the Dragon and The Talons of the Tiger first, and then to read collections such as Books for a Rainy Day and A Garden of One’s Own. I had a harder time reading Zhou Zuoren than Lu Xun, and I couldn’t get through his copybook articles. Mr. Han said that after I turned fifty, I could read more. After I turned fifty, the Cultural Revolution had long ended, and I was the busiest period, running publications, translating books, and leading graduate students, so I had no time to read Zhou Zuoren’s books again. Now that I am 70 years old, I still haven’t read it again, but I have only read works on Zhou Zuoren. At that time, Mr. Han also listened to Mr. Zhou, a lecturer of the Chinese Department, who was a teacher of modern literature. He specialized in Ye Shengtao, but he was also familiar with other writers of the May Fourth period, and he also talked about many great writers and their works, which made up for my deficiencies in this area. I can say that I attended half of the Chinese department during the Cultural Revolution. Now that both of them have passed away, I still look back on their faces and smiles with gratitude, and I wonder how much time would have been wasted without them.
After the military industrial propaganda team entered, I could no longer study with Mr. Han. Soon after, they started to clean up the class ranks. During the fall of Beiping, Mr. Han had dealings with Zhou Zuoren, and also ran a publication with a friend, which became a serious problem. At that time, we faculty members were put into three kinds of study classes: one category belonged to those who had serious problems and lived in the school to explain the problems, and were not allowed to go home. The second category belonged to those with problems or reactionary ideas, who studied on one side and explained their problems on the other, but could go home. The third category was for ordinary staff members to study the writings of Chairman Mao, raise their political consciousness, and strive for revolutionization of their thinking as soon as possible. I was assigned to the third category of study classes, and Mr. Han was assigned to the first category of study classes, so our situations were reversed. We could not see each other again. The three types of study classes were mixed with teachers and students, and the students led us to study Mao. Every day, we sat in a classroom for three units of study, the so-called three grinders: grinding time, grinding mouth, grinding pants. I was already part of the revolutionary masses and had a status comparable to that of the Red Guards, but I was still politically inferior, and I was still a dead end in the study class. I was and still am averse to long and empty speeches, but instead of being disgusted by them, I was sincerely grateful for them during that period. If no one spoke, I might have been called upon to speak. I had to say something against my will, and it was unbearable. One of the students in my study class was a stammerer who liked to speak and could stammer for an hour, and I was so grateful to him that I wished he would keep speaking. When someone spoke, I could go back to “Liaozhai” or review in my head what Mr. Han had said about Lu Xun, or review poems I had memorized in the past. As I listened to his stammering speech, I thought of the words of Narcissus from Wang Gui’an: “On the Qiantang River is my slave’s house, if Lang comes to have tea at his leisure. The walls are made of yellow earth, the house is covered with thatch, and there is a tree of horsetail flowers in front of the door.” Another expressive student likes to show off his rhetoric, but he uses words inappropriately and often mispronounces them, which is fun to hear. For example, he pronounced “attain” as “create fat”. It was probably a new word he learned, and he was so proud of it that he said it several times in a row. There was no response from the class. I remembered the poem “Jia Ping Gong Zi”: “What can be waved? Flowers and beans are born in the river. If you have a son-in-law like this, you might as well be a prostitute!” I probably had a smile on my face, and this silly guy thought I was fascinated by what I was hearing, so he was especially polite to me later, calling me “Old Blue”. I reviewed what I had learned in my head every day and never “held a little meeting” down there. The students who chaired the meeting thought I listened to others and had a good attitude, but I spoke too little, and if I spoke actively, I could not be considered a dead end. Soon I got another chance to show progress.
The university’s military-industrial propaganda team called on revolutionary teachers and students to carry out a major criticism, and the military-industrial propaganda team of the foreign language department wanted Russian majors to criticize Soviet revision. They probably knew from the speeches of the head of the Central Committee that there was a Soviet writer named Shaulokhov who was the originator of Soviet revisionism in literature and art, and decided to criticize his novel “What Happened to a Man”. The head of the military-industrial propaganda team wanted to make a splash, hoping that the foreign language department’s critical article would at least be broadcast throughout the school and strive to be published in the school magazine, preferably in the Tianjin “Red Flag of the Literary Union”. Not caring about the class line, they found three students who were good in their schoolwork but not very well-born, formed a criticism group from them, appointed one student as the leader, and found a classroom for them. The students in the critique group immediately became ten times more valuable, and instead of attending the study classes, they went out at will to search for materials (the library no longer had them), and together they conceived a critique of Hong Wen. But they were only second-year students, and not only were they not yet initiated in Russian, but they also lacked a minimum of writing skills. I dare say that they did not write anything except for the big word posters that did not make sense in literature and science. The first drafts they wrote could not even be read by the Department’s industrial propaganda team. But they were revolutionary youngsters who would not be overwhelmed by the difficulties and took out three days to retreat, study the writings of Chairman Mao and, with hatred for Su Xiu, went into battle again. The second draft was passed by the Department of Military Industrial Propaganda Team, but was beaten back by the School Military Industrial Propaganda Team. I learned all this only after I joined the criticism team. Time was limited, and the departmental military industrial propaganda team was eager to produce results and informed me to join the critique group. Some people say this is called fighting poison with poison. I proposed not to attend the study group and asked to go back to the dormitory to write. They all actually agreed. I took the second draft written by the students home, opened it, and felt that the outline was not bad, only that the logic was confused, the literature did not make sense, I had no understanding of the background of the novel’s time, and I knew nothing about the plot of the story. Learning from Comrade Yao Wenyuan, I kept the student’s outline, straightened out the logic, corrected the sick sentences and misspelled words, and produced a brutal and unreasonable critique. I titled the article “Long Live the Revolutionary War! Two days later I handed the transcribed manuscript to the head of the criticism group and told him that they had written a very good article, and that I had only changed it a little, so if it was not correct, please change it again. Long Live the Revolutionary War! The article was soon broadcast throughout the university in the name of the Military Industrial Propaganda Team of the Department of Foreign Languages, and was broadcast several times in a row. Then it was published in the school magazine and the “Red Flag of the Literary Union”. The military-industrial propaganda team was very satisfied, and the junior general of the criticism team was very pleased. I had the opportunity to tell people that it was all the work of the Red Guard juniors and that I had not contributed anything. To my complete surprise, the military industrial propaganda team gave me half a month’s leave, so that my wife and I could climb Mount Huangshan, which was almost empty of tourists.
I was persecuted less than many people during the Cultural Revolution, and wasted less time than many others. I hadn’t completely stopped studying after all. This has to do with my understanding of the Cultural Revolution. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution I decided that it was yet another absurd political movement, and that I must not devote myself fanatically to it, but try to protect myself and not harm others in the movement. But the movement developed so violently and lasted so long, which I did not expect. The authoritative assessment of the Cultural Revolution is now a complete rejection, because it led the country’s economy to the brink of collapse. This is an economic calculation, which is certainly true. I think there should also be an ethical and moral account. The Cultural Revolution brought traditional ethics and morality, as well as the common moral code of mankind, to the brink of collapse, and the latter was no less damaging to the Chinese nation than the former. Are many of the negative phenomena in society today not related to the Cultural Revolution? I have tried to find out the real motives of the Cultural Revolution, and I have set up various hypotheses, which I have disproved one by one. I experienced the Cultural Revolution, but I could not understand it in a real and comprehensive way. I couldn’t get a complete answer from other people’s writings. Maybe we, the generation that experienced the Cultural Revolution, are not intelligent enough, so we have to hope for the next generation.
From “Those People, Those Things” by Lan Yingnian, Guangdong People’s Publishing House, August 2014.
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