I. Gains Beyond the Intention of “Re-education”
The most shocking event that happened during the Zhiqing era was the Lin Biao Incident. The Lin Biao Incident was like a bomb to the Zhiqing, or rather to a part of them, which blew up our fanatical brains of blind faith and blind worship, and woke them up. The reflection of this part of the people on history should be said to have started at that time.
In fact, before the official announcement of the “9.13” incident, a few of my friends from the Hydrology Team 9 and I had secretly heard the relevant reports through the “enemy station”. My friends from Team 9 lived on the top of the mountain in a household of three, and my friends from Team 6 lived in a long yard on the mountainside. The housing of the 9th team was converted from a warehouse that temporarily stored grain on the sun-dam, and there were no other residents around, so several of us often listened to Taiwan and Hong Kong programs in the dead of night around Duck (nicknamed), a very rare semiconductor radio at that time, and sometimes received Chinese programs from NHK in Japan.
When they went to the countryside, they had a very strong rebellious spirit, and the more the authorities opposed them, the more they would do them. For example, singing “yellow songs” was very popular among the intellectuals shortly after they left the countryside. At that time, some of the songs officially recognized as “yellow songs” were revolutionary songs of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War, such as “Katyusha,” “Little Road,” “Song of the Komsomol members,” and others. Popular lyrical songs, movie episodes, folk songs like “Evening in the Moscow Suburbs,” “The Blooming Flower,” “The Beautiful Girl,” and “The Beautiful Girl” are among the most popular. Laz’s Song”, “Rita’s Song”, etc. My sister and her sisters went to the countryside one day after the summer harvest. One day after the summer harvest when my sister and her sisters went to the countryside, several classmates got together to learn and sing these songs, and they didn’t sleep all night. We listened to Hong Kong, Taiwanese and foreign radio programs with the same mentality.
“After 9.13 happened, the “enemy station” quickly followed up with reports, and we must have known about it even earlier than the leaders of the County Reform Committee at that time. When we heard the news, our initial reaction was that we couldn’t believe it, “Could it be a malicious attack by enemies outside the country? I believed it, but I didn’t know how to react psychologically to an event as big as a magnitude 8 earthquake. As Chen Danqing said: “My head is filled with the following contents – Li Hongzhang lost his power and humiliated the country, the Boxer Rebellion defended the country, Chiang Kai-shek only picked peaches, and the landlords were all Zhou Pickpies…”. ……”, with such a muddle-headedness, it was hard to figure out the question: how and why would Lin Biao, the Great Leader’s closest comrade and successor, the one man above all others in China, betray him?
However, at that time, we already had the hazy feeling of being used and then abandoned, and the hardships of life became the most real to us, and the little breakers of the Cultural Revolution were far from being as crazy as they had been in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Did our desertion to the countryside have anything to do with Lin Biao’s increased war preparations and the evacuation of the urban population? Now that he is dead and not engaged in war preparations, do we have any hope of returning to the city? Of course, all speculations and comments were confined to a small circle of familiar people, and never dared the “outsiders” to know. At that time, what we were doing was considered an “active counterrevolutionary” crime, and we were going to jail.
Around the end of September or the beginning of October, presumably as a unified top-down operation, all rural grassroots cadres in the commune, including brigade secretaries, captains, accountants, militia company leaders, regimental branch secretaries, women’s directors, production team captains, accountants, cashiers, poor association leaders, and militia platoon leaders, were summoned to the commune that day to deliver the “central document” on the Lin Biao incident. “. When the cadres came back from the meeting, mysteriously, it was kind of funny how they were all full of secrets, but they didn’t dare to say anything. It is said that there is a rule at the top that only cadres who have reached a certain level are qualified to convey this document.
On the third day after the commune’s three-level cadre meeting, all the men, women and children in our brigade who could barely understand and read the newspaper were called together, one by one, and a cadre from the county read out the central government’s document on the “9.13” incident. After the document was delivered, each production team organized several studies and discussions on the “spirit of the document,” criticizing Lin Biao’s heinous crimes against Chairman Mao, the great leader, the Communist Party, and socialism. More than two years later (I had left the countryside, my sister remained there), Lin Biao was again linked to Confucius, who was thousands of years ago, and Lin Biao’s “restoration” was linked to Confucius’ “restoration of rites,” and an even more vigorous criticism was made, called “The Spirit of the Document. The “Criticism of Forests and Confucius” campaign.
In the frequent criticism meetings, the peasants did not have the excitement, enthusiasm, and joy that they had when the production teams held the distribution meeting, and except for a few cadres who learned what they heard from the commune, no one with high awareness expressed their opinions. The situation was like all other political propaganda meetings at that time: the atmosphere was dull, with the old peasants smoking their homemade leaf tobacco and spitting all over the ground with their “blah blah blah,” while the women “hissed, hissed, hissed, and hissed”. “The peasants in the mountains were not interested in Lin Biao, who had been dead for thousands of years and had nothing to do with Confucius. The uneducated, long-locked, poverty-stricken peasants in the mountains were not interested in Lin Biao, and even less interested in Confucius, who had been dead for thousands of years and had nothing to do with their lives.
It should be said, not that they are selfish, indifferent and insensitive, but they are too aware of their social status, as they often mock themselves: Is it possible to expel them from the peasant register and send me to the city? At least in the impoverished mountainous areas where we have settled, farmers have been working from sunrise to sunset for generations, planting the land, collecting grain, eating, and giving birth to children. The various changes in the outside world have not brought them a good life with enough food to eat, so the solemn and solemn documents of the central government conveyed from top to bottom are just a fresh topic for them to talk about when they are resting in the fields. They follow their own philosophy: “Don’t do anything illegal, and don’t take medicine that makes people sick.
One of the major gains I made in the countryside, beyond the original meaning of “receiving re-education”, was that I learned about the real situation of society, which was very different from the concepts I had formed in school through orthodox education. The living conditions of the peasants that we witnessed with our own eyes easily shattered the whitewashed dreams of peace in our minds; the simple and simple Longmen Zhen Zhen of the peasants allowed us to see the real situation of the countryside from different perspectives. This is something that many intellectuals have deep experience with.
My sister has told us several incidents.
1, once on a job, the women were pulling weeds in an Ipomoea monopoly, and the person pulling weeds in the monopoly next to her was an aunt. Her father-in-law had been the chairman of the Soviet Union (the administrative division was unclear at that time, and should have been below the township level) when the Red Fourth Front Army established the northern Sichuan base, and her husband, as the son-in-law of a man with a foreign surname, sat in a relatively important position in the production team as a cashier, and was considered a respectable team cadre. The other day, my sister asked my aunt, “Which is better, the past or the present? The other day, my sister asked my aunt, “Auntie, which is better, the past life or the present life? The aunt blurted out, “Of course it was better before! I used to eat a lot of dry rice and noodles. After finishing, the auntie felt something was wrong and quickly added, now or never.
Farmers have their own opinions about rich landlords and farmers. There are two rich farmers in my sister’s production team, the whole team of men, women and children, including the brigade, production team cadres, are called rich farmers by generation: brother (sister), father (aunt) (local people call the senior male call father, his father called father). When I first went to the countryside, my sister, whose head was filled with the class line and class struggle, was particularly puzzled by this phenomenon: why didn’t the peasants in the revolutionary base areas say “affinity to class division” when there was still harmony between them and their class enemies? So unaware of your class? The girl said, “We are rich landlords and farmers here. It’s too uneconomical to become a rich landlord farmer.
- My sister also asked the old farmers in the production team, “Do you fight rich landowner farmers here? The old farmer said, “Let’s fight, why not? They said, “Those damned landlords gave us big “pyramid meat” that was so fat that it ran down the corners of our mouths, and they themselves ate the lean stuff; they gave us “rice soup”. It’s so dry that you can put it on a gabion mat (a gabion mat for food storage). It’s a good thing we’ve been bloated! The old farmer finished, knocked his pipe, and looked serious, without the slightest intention of joking.
These ordinary and unimportant Dragon Gate Formations were like thunderbolts from the blue sky in my sister’s heart. But at that time, she didn’t dare to talk about or even think about it, and of course, she didn’t have the knowledge and theoretical accomplishment to “think about it” deeply.
After living in the countryside for several years, I carefully observed the peasants’ character, attitude toward labor and life, and the result of this, and found that in production teams, it was often the upper and middle peasants who were the best at farm work, and they were the leaders of the team in terms of water, fertilizer, soil, seeds, densities, custodial work, weather and harvest. They are serious about their work, they take care of their crops extremely well, and they also rely on their wages to earn a living, but their families are always better arranged than others: the vegetables they grow on their own land grow more vigorously than others; they never run out of food during the spring famine; even the cattle they raise are stronger and have slicker coats than others.
As long as the political environment allows, they should be the first ones to get rich. But some of them are particularly good, but they are idle lazy people, and their homes are in tatters, often without food to eat. I was particularly puzzled when I saw these phenomena soon after going to the countryside, and was told after I became more familiar with the farmers that their grandparents and fathers were not solid farmers, and that their lazy eating habits had been passed down from generation to generation, which was why they were so poor.
I was particularly impressed by a demobilized soldier in the volunteer army, who was the leader of the production team’s poor cooperative. This poor farmer, who had joined the volunteer army, was also an eye-opener for us Zhiqing from another angle.
When we heard that he was a demobilized soldier in the volunteer army, we went to his home with great enthusiasm, both to see our hero and to hear the hero’s story of fighting the American devils in his own words.
We couldn’t believe our eyes at the poverty of the volunteers’ families; the volunteers in front of us were not as imposing as we had imagined; he told us about his experience on the Korean battlefield, and we were even more amazed. He said, “Hey, those American devils are just too powerful, they just came up and divided us up and surrounded us. The order from our superiors at that time was to split up and break out. In fact, we were told to find our own way to escape from the encirclement. We men were fine, but the most pitiful were the women soldiers, who were usually quite energetic, singing and dancing but not shooting guns, and had no tactical skills or physical strength to save themselves. The female soldiers cried, shed tears and knelt on the ground, begging the male soldiers to take them out……
In this detail, let us – the successors of the revolution, who grew up under the influence of stories like “Who is the loveliest man? -I’m amazed that all the female soldiers are Wang Fang! Aren’t those male soldiers all Wang Cheng!
There is a huge difference between the poor team leader we see before us and the young soldier in the story of his youth that he uses to remember. We see him and the other peasants in the Dragon’s Gate formation, he is lazy, has nothing better to do than wander around the countryside, and is in debt, but where is the shadow of the heroic soldier with ideals and a passion for defending his country? The only material evidence in the family that he had been a volunteer soldier was a military coat, but it had rotted into a fishing net and was spread on the dusty ground as a bedding for his children. He was known in the commune for his poverty and laziness, and the government couldn’t do anything without him every year, so the cadres had a headache with him. If he didn’t show us some photos of his time in North Korea, we couldn’t imagine that such a person would be the “loveliest person” in Wei Wei’s book.
Unfortunately, we could only listen to his story at that time, and now we can only recall the most impressive part of it. Not having the awareness and ability to collect oral history materials at that time, we missed a very rare opportunity, and it is irreparable.
In the wide world, one person, one sentence, one event was a thunderbolt on the ground for all of us. The answers to many questions and doubts, so vividly and concretely laid out before us, are contrary to what we have long been told about class exploitation and class oppression. We began to doubt, we began to think, we began to turn ourselves into a subject instead of an object blindly worshipped and dominated by others. We, the reckless and impulsive high school students, who had basically no brains of our own during the Cultural Revolution, slowly and truly grew up under the “re-education of the poor peasants and middle peasants.
The Story of the Old Red Army
In the early 1930s, several counties in northern Sichuan such as Tongjiang, Nanjiang, Bazhong, Wangcang, Cangxi, and Langzhong in the Daba Mountains were once the bases established by the Fourth Front Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army led by Zhang Guotao. When we heard that this was an old revolutionary base before we went to the countryside, we were still a little excited, because the revolutionary base was as revered and worshiped by our generation as it was by the leaders. After we had settled down, we realized that the base in which we were living could not be compared to the “base” that had been imprinted on our minds through long years of traditional revolutionary education.
Now, Cangxi County has built a memorial hall and monument on the site where the Red Fourth Front Army left the Daba Mountains to cross the Jialing River in the west in response to the Red One Armies. The only traces of the Red Army, the revolutionary base, and the smoky war are the Red Army Hospital near the county seat, the old Red Army soldiers scattered in the mountains, and the “barbarian caves” on many rocks. According to the farmers, those “barbarian caves” were where the Red Army left the guerrillas in the past.
The peasants talked about the “Soviet” of that year, saying, “Chairman Zhang, Chairman Zhang,” with words full of respect, and no one was surprised to learn that he was the “Chairman” of the Red Army. I was very surprised at that time that they criticized Zhang Guotao for being a traitor to the Central Committee. They had no knowledge of what happened to the Red Fourth Front Army or of Zhang Guotao’s whereabouts, just as we did, and only the history of the revolutionary base in northern Sichuan survived with them.
The “Old Red Army” in Cangxi County were all peasants who joined the Red Fourth Front Army. They followed the Long March to climb snowy mountains and cross grasslands several times, and many of the Red Army’s West Road Troops were soldiers from the northern Sichuan base, whose experiences and tragedies were only gradually revealed after the reform and opening up in the 1980s.
These peasant fighters survived the war because they were uneducated, but more likely because they were Zhang Guotao’s subordinates, and because of their political background, only a few of them were promoted after gaining power and stayed in the big cities to enjoy the fruits of victory. Many more went back to the countryside, back to the kind of life they had before they became Red Army soldiers.
However, after all, they had eaten the bark and roots of the trees, gone through the bullets, shed their blood during the war years, and made great contributions to the new regime, so they could not be left behind completely. Cangxi County, in accordance with state regulations, set aside a piece of land near the county seat and built a small building, where some of the old Red Army soldiers and their families were given a high-standard house – compared to the extremely low standard of living at the time. This place was called the “Red Army Yard”.
“They were treated more highly than the secretary and president of the commune at the time. Every year, commune cadres would pay their respects to the veteran Red Army members of their own commune. The children of the old Red Army were properly taken care of in terms of job arrangements, etc. Therefore, they were the lucky ones who were less fortunate than the top and more fortunate than the bottom.
In addition to the above-mentioned old Red Army soldiers who enjoy preferential local treatment, there are also some “scattered” old Red Army soldiers in the countryside. The “scattered” of the old Red Army was “scattered” because some of them stayed behind when Zhang Guotao led his troops to leave the countryside, originally saying they would stay behind to fight guerrillas, but in fact they went home; some of them found it too hard or were rejected during the expedition and were unwilling to continue. They stayed in the ranks and deserted and went home. The identity of this group of people, the old Red Army, is somewhat paradoxical, and it seems reasonable that they would be “scattered.
However, there is another part of the old Red Army that is “genuine”. They have been fighting all their lives, from the Long March to the War of Liberation, but they were too uneducated and confused to see the situation and identify the direction of the revolution for more than ten years, and did not keep up with the times.
These two groups of “old Red Army” did not enjoy the treatment of “moving into the Red Army compound”; they received a monthly living allowance of 25 RMB and a small ration of pork, cooking oil and other items. They received a living allowance that was less than the wages of young workers in the city who had just been apprenticed, and lived a life of poverty not much different from that of ordinary mountain peasants.
There was such an old Red Army scattered in the Equalization Brigade of our commune, and because he spoke in a low voice (I don’t know if it was caused by some injuries he suffered during the war), people nicknamed him “Zhang urn Cheng”, but his real name was forgotten. After winning the war, he also participated in the battle of Mt. Mengliang in which he besieged the 74th Division of the elite KMT troops.
The reason why he did not become a senior general and enjoy the country’s generous political and living conditions, and was not even able to stay in the most basic Red Army compound, is probably because he was not only uneducated, but also resigned himself to death, and belonged to the kind of people who were brave in battle, but were confused in the face of “right and wrong. He seems to have obeyed “President Zhang” all his life, and he never stops talking about “President Zhang”. As a result, it goes without saying that his revolutionary experience and combat achievements were erased by his “political brain”, and he became one of the old Red Army soldiers “scattered” in the countryside.
After he won the national victory, he returned to his hometown to receive a monthly living allowance of 25 yuan, and the man we saw was already a complete image of an old peasant. However, he seemed to be optimistic by nature, and seemed to be satisfied with the monthly living allowance of 25 yuan and the supply of meat and oil, and he was also very active in the commune. Because of his status as an old Red Army soldier, the cadres in the commune were very respectful of him.
The first year he went to the countryside, the commune was probably instructed by the higher-ups to provide “traditional revolutionary education” to the Zhiqing. On that day, all the Zhiqing of the commune were summoned to the meeting room of the commune and invited Zhang Wencheng, an old Red Army soldier with revolutionary experience and some eloquence, to give them a lecture on the revolutionary history of the Red Army.
It was an event that deeply shocked many of them, as the old Red Army said the history of the revolution.
“Zhang Jucheng was uneducated, so he was probably too busy running around in war after joining the army and had no time for tutorials, and as a result his political awareness was never high. However, his experience was extraordinary. Although he was just an ordinary soldier, he experienced something that was never officially disclosed, and then he was at the bottom of the social ladder, so he spoke freely, telling us historical facts that were unheard of at the time and would never have been read in an official publication.
I don’t know if the commune cadres had explained this to him before, but he was more cautious when he began his speech, and gave us a great speech. The “paid” meeting was in full swing, and the old Red Army’s revolutionary reasoning was largely ignored. In the early 1930s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Communist Party of China (CPPCC) began to make dramatic changes in the revolutionary tradition of education.
In the early 1930s, Zhang Guotao, one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, led the Fourth Front Army of the Chinese Red Army and established the Red Army Base and Soviet power in the northern Sichuan region, which is a well-known history. The first places they reached over the Daba Mountains were Tongjiang, Nanjiang, and Bazhong, and this area of Cangxi County was the fruit of the later expansion of the base area, so the peasants of Cangxi are not quite sure of the origin of the Red Army.
Due to the high mountains in the northern part of Sichuan and the remoteness of the area, the warlords of Sichuan at that time were not very strict in their control of this impoverished place with little oil and water, and the central government of the Kuomintang was not in control of Sichuan at that time. In this uncontrolled region, Zhang Guotao’s army grew rapidly and smoothly, reaching about 100,000 men at its peak, and covering several counties, including Cangxi, Wangcang, Langzhong, Tongjiang, Nanjiang, and Ba Zhong. When the Kuomintang government deployed its troops to besiege the then Central Red Army base, Zhang’s team settled in a corner of northern Sichuan, where it had a stable foothold, and the warlords who besieged the Red Fourth Front were no match for the Red Army. Therefore, when the Central Committee retreated from the Soviet Zone in Jiangxi, Zhang’s career in Sichuan was flourishing.
At that time, the old Red Army soldier “Zhang urn Cheng” was just an ordinary soldier and did not know much about the situation within the Party and the Red Army hierarchy, so he could only tell us his own experience and what he saw and heard from the perspective of a soldier.
He said.
When the Central Red Army crossed the Jinsha River in a detour through Guizhou and Yunnan to the Tibetan settlement of Songpan Mao’ergai in northwest Sichuan, Chairman Zhang, with his loyalty to the Central Committee, went to Mao’ergai to greet them. The Central Red Army was in rags, its men and horses were exhausted, and there was an acute shortage of guns and ammunition. Zhang sent the Central Red Army to the “base area” to rest and recuperate (the base area in north Sichuan had been abandoned and another area had been created in northwest Sichuan). The Red Army took out food, clothing, guns, and ammunition, which was sufficient under the circumstances, to supply the Central Red Army. Since the officers and soldiers of the Central Red Army had left their base in Jiangxi, they had been without regular provisions, and had been living half-starved and half-full for a long time, gobbling up rice and pork whenever they saw them.
What the top leaders did during the convergence of the two front armies, of course, Zhang Lao Red Army did not know, his story goes like this.
One day we suddenly received an order that the Central Red Army had left and that we should go after them.
We immediately set out to chase after the Central Red Army.
When we reached a place not too far outside the compound, we saw a group of Central Committee Red Army marching in front of us. We took no precautions, chasing after them and shouting at them, mainly to call them back. Suddenly, the Red Army column in front of us dispersed, and they quickly took up a favorable position and opened fire on us.
At first we thought that the Central Red Army had mistaken us for KMT pursuers, so we shouted, “We are from the Fourth Front, and President Zhang invites you to return. Little did we know that when we shouted, the other side’s guns would fire even harder and with even more firepower. The old Red Army seemed to have traveled back in time to the scene, and he was very emotional when he said.
This “pissed off” (in the sense of being very angry) me, I fed you, I clothed you, and you sons of bitches shot me with the guns I gave you! Fight! We fought back, but the other side stopped fighting us. They retreated quickly, and we didn’t catch up with them after a while.
We interrogated the prisoners and they confessed that they had received orders from their superiors to open fire if any of the Red Fourth Army men caught up with them.
After hearing the prisoners’ confessions, the lower ranking officers and soldiers of our Red Fourth Front Army were outraged and thought that the Central Red Army would avenge their deaths. So, we beat up the captives of one of the parties and drove them away. Zhang Lao Red Army added, “If not for the intervention from above, we soldiers would have really killed them.
After the Central Red Army left, the Red Army sent someone else, and this time President Zhang listened to them respectfully for some reason, and was commanded by them to lead our Red Fourth Front Army away from its base in the Beichuan area, and followed the One-Sided Army across the grasslands toward Shaanxi and Gansu.
……
Most of the Red Fourth Front Army were peasants in the mountainous areas of northern Sichuan, who thought that they could live and work in peace and contentment by following President Zhang to make a name for themselves in their hometown. Later, those who deserted on the way back to their hometowns and those who were sent back to their hometowns from Yan’an became the “scattered” old Red Army after the establishment of the government; those who followed the team not only died in battle, but also countless others drowned in the swamps, froze to death in the snowy mountains, and died of starvation on the less-traveled roads.
As time has passed, the stories told by the old Red Army have been blurred by time, and what remains in the mind today is only a small remnant of his long and impressive narrative. At that time, no detailed oral history record was made, still because of our ignorance at that time, especially regretful. Now, the old Red Army has gone by the wayside, and the original site of the Red Army compound has been named Red Army Road, but nothing else seems to be left.
With the declassification of many top-secret archives, and the gradual flow of dissident writings from those days to the public, the historical facts told to us by the old Red Army were no longer a shocking secret that could cause a sensation, but at that time, they shocked us to our core, and we heard for the first time about the internal struggles of the Red Army outside of the textbooks and all the revolutionary traditions of education, which was completely different from the orthodox story. History. The Old Red Army’s “hush-hush” has shown us that history is not always what it says it is. We were later able to think more independently, thanks to the enlightenment of the Old Red Army’s “glibness”.
The “strange encounter” on the way home to visit relatives.
I have only been home once in three years in the countryside, for the Spring Festival in 1971. I don’t remember much about how my life was like back then. At that time, when Zhiqing returned to the city, it was just to walk around the streets, see the long-lost city, visit each other, and invite some friends to go to the northern hot springs or Jinyun Mountain. I’m ashamed to say, in that most precious time of my life, I didn’t even think to touch the books, at that time, the dream of entering the temple of knowledge to climb the peak of science, in the atmosphere of “reading is useless, science is a crime”, has been completely shattered.
At that time, like most Zhiqing, my greatest wish was to be recruited back to the city as a worker. I once read an article in the Reader about a few high school students in Beijing who were contemporaries of mine, who insisted on studying on their own during their years in the countryside and even set up a mathematics research group. All of them later had successful careers and received their PhDs in China or abroad. According to my assessment of my own abilities and fundamentals, I believe I could have achieved much more than I do today if I had been as persistent in self-learning as they were in the countryside. I can only blame myself for being short-sighted at that time, and losing the goal of my life in the face of the harsh reality.
The only time I went home during the Zhiqing years, a strange and frightening thing happened on the way, which I still remember vividly.
Chen Shubei, a friend of the third team of Xinmin, was on the way home, and when we arrived at the county town, we met another familiar young man from the commune and agreed to walk together. When we arrived at the county seat, we were told that there was a consolation group from Chongqing, and that the bus they were taking from the Chongqing Renjiao No. 2 Terminal would return to Chongqing the next day empty. We were so excited by this news that we immediately looked around for the driver of this bus.
Chen Shupei was very good at dealing with all kinds of people, and was familiar with meetings, now called public relations. When we found the driver, he went up to us, handed us a cigarette and struck up a conversation with him. The driver was young, less than thirty years old, not difficult to talk to, Chen Shupei did not make much effort, and the driver agreed to give us a ride back to Chongqing. When we left Cangxi County the next day, in addition to the driver and his assistant, there were more than a dozen other Zhiqing hitchhikers in the car, some of whom we lobbied on our own, some of whom found the driver through a sympathy group, and some of whom were introduced to us by the county Zhiqing office.
The driver was no exception. As soon as he got on the bus, he said to us, “Guys, if you see any wild chickens on the road today, help us catch a few of them.
I’m not sure how much I owe you, but I’m not sure how much I owe you.
From Cangxi County, the car slowed down whenever it passed farmers’ yards, and we stared out the window to see if any chickens ran out to feed. The driver’s luck was not good, as we didn’t see a small hen swinging by the side of the road until we reached the Levant. The driver braked the car and opened the door, and several of us rushed down to catch the chicken.
The little hen scampered around surrounded by several people, it screamed wildly, desperately flapping its flightless wings to help it run, and as soon as it was about to break out of the circle, I grabbed it by the tail. Almost at the same time, the farmers working in the nearby fields heard the hen’s desperate cries and shouted, “Someone’s stealing the chickens! The people in the field came rushing over with their hoes and burdens in their hands, shouting all the way. When we saw this, we grabbed the chickens and hurriedly got into the car, the driver stepped on the gas pedal and the car roared out.
Some farmers in front of us stood in the middle of the road and tried to stop the car. The driver gritted his teeth and didn’t let go of the gas pedal as he rushed forward. After all, the farmers who stopped the car were afraid of death, so they got out of the way at the last moment. After a kilometer or two, the farmers who stopped the car and chased after us were lost. We were so nervous, we didn’t dare to stop when we got to Langzhong, fearing that someone had informed the Langzhong public security, who was now waiting there with a net waiting for us to jump in. It was only when we were more than twenty kilometers away from Langzhong that the driver dared to stop the car to make things easier for everyone and to find a place to eat.
After a thrilling ride, the driver never mentioned the chicken catch again. We arrived in Nanchong that evening, and the journey was uneventful. The journey was uneventful. As we stayed in Nanchong, we all put what had happened on the road behind us, never thinking that an even bigger storm would be waiting for us the next day. However, this storm had nothing to do with stealing chickens, but if it did, it was definitely “a god in the sky”, and the heavens did not allow us to be punished for stealing and robbing.
The next day at dawn, we set out. The usual route would have taken us through Xichong, Hechuan, Beibei, and then to downtown Chongqing. It would have been safe to go this way. He decided to cross the Jialing River and take the road through Guang’an and Xikou to downtown Chongqing, which would have been fine if the road had been in normal condition. If the road was in normal condition – if the car could cross the river very smoothly at the ferry crossing – he would have arrived at his destination without incident. Unfortunately, that morning the fog was so thick that cars were waiting for the river crossing for almost a kilometer. Our car had to join the long line of cars waiting to cross the river.
At this time, as if coming out of the ground, a man who looked like an old worker suddenly appeared beside the car and said he wanted to ride with us. We couldn’t decide, so we told him to talk to the driver. The driver and his assistant got out of the car, and without saying anything to the old man, they quarreled. The young and energetic driver raised his hand and slapped the old man, and his assistant stepped forward and punched him in the chest, causing the old man to stagger and fall to the ground on his back. The two of them went back up and kicked the old man in the buttocks unrelentingly.
At this time, the pedestrians on the road had started to increase, and when they saw the beating, all of a sudden they cascaded around in a circle to watch the fun. When the old man saw the crowd, he suddenly opened his throat and cried and screamed like a woman who had made a scene. Among the onlookers, there were voices of injustice: which one was the one who beat him? Come out and reason! We were worried that things were getting worse, so we rushed over to the old man on the ground and pulled him up, even persuaded him to move aside, and someone among the onlookers came out and helped him away.
At that point, the incident seemed to be over. When I looked around, the fog showed no sign of dissipating, so I met up with another person in the same car and went to a nearby store for breakfast, after which I wandered the streets for a while. As the day dawned, the fog began to recede and thinned out, so we headed back to the ferry.
As we were approaching the ferry crossing (the street is much higher than the crossing and we could see clearly down below), we noticed that something was wrong.
I didn’t think much of it and didn’t stop, but instead I picked up my pace and went to see what was going on. When I came to a place a dozen paces away from our car, I saw two men with a young man in the car facing me. This man was a classmate of an intellectual friend from our hydrology brigade (I remember his name clearly, but I don’t want to write it down here). At that time, I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I saw him raise his hand, point it at me, and say, “Him too. One of the faces of his escort immediately twisted and shouted at the top of his voice, “Arrest him -! In a split second, several men rushed up to me, grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back, pushing me into the crowd and standing with the driver and his assistant. It was then that a phrase from during the Cultural Revolution martial arts fights came to my mind: “Someone lit the water! Although I did nothing in the whole incident.
I still don’t understand why he “ordered” my “water” when there were more than a dozen people hitchhiking. I don’t know him well, and I have no grudge against him, so I can only speculate: Is he aware of my Taiwanese family background through some channel and dragged me in as a back-up, so that he can avoid the pain during the interrogation with the Black 5 dogs in front of him?
Soon, the four of us – me, the driver and his assistant, and the guy who ordered the water – were pulled from the side of the car to a higher place by the side of the road, where a dozen men twisted our arms, pulled our hair, and made us look up in the face, just like the jets we flew in the early days of the Cultural Revolution when we were fighting capitalists, reactionary academic authorities, and all kinds of cows and snakes. The road was crowded with people. There were so many people on the road, yelling and screaming so loudly that it was hard to hear what they were yelling about. I saw people shaking their fists as if they were going to come up and beat us up. I wasn’t afraid, but I wondered: how could that old worker-looking man have so much power to start such a loud mass protest meeting? In a short while, something even more puzzling happened. Two soldiers appeared from nowhere, and after saying a few words to one of the leaders of the men who had grabbed us, they took us away.
I was not familiar with the city of Nanchong at all, so I fainted as I was being escorted around, going nowhere. It was only at this moment that I began to feel a little panic in my heart, wondering if we had been arrested. If sent to a detention center, how long will they be held? It’s not easy to go home once and then just zero out? Alas …… thought, “I’m glad we have a driver with us, because if we are released, we won’t have to worry about the ride home. On the way, I was taken into a house, where a fat military man sat in an office on the first floor. On the first floor, in an office, a fat soldier with a cross-cheeked face sat inside, looking like someone had already reported to him, and he was waiting for us.
When we entered, he sized us up for a while with crossed eyes before interrogating us with authority and a northern Sichuan accent: Name. Residence. Occupation. When we had finished answering, he was silent for about a minute, then suddenly jumped up from his chair like a spring in his ass, bounced in front of us, and cursed us: How dare you! Eh? How dare they come to the ground in Nanchong and beat people up! Eh? After cursing for a while, he pressed toward the driver step by step, staring at him with a fierce, unseeing stare. As I watched, my heart was furious, and a chill ran up my back.
“As if he had made a great discovery, he stretched out his head to look repeatedly at the military fleece jacket inside the driver’s open coat and asked, “Were you a soldier too? The driver said yes. Also asked, in what unit? The driver said it was in the 26th Army. Again, which unit of the 26th Army? A, 37th Division Chemical Defense Company. This question and answer, “cross meat”‘s face even opened up the fog, and his tone also eased, you see you see, we are originally comrades. It was the 26th Army’s 37th Division that was stationed in Nanchong. I don’t know if the driver got the news earlier and made it up on the fly, or if it was a real coincidence. I’m not sure if the driver had gotten the message earlier and made it up on short notice, or if it was just a coincidence that he did. The driver saw that there was a turn of events, and immediately said yes, yes, yes, never again. The “cross-meat” graceful amnesty, then, all right, you stand aside. The driver obediently stepped aside.
The “cross meat” turned his face to face with the driver’s assistant, and in the blink of an eye, he was back to his original fierce appearance, he did not speak, he swung his hand and punched his assistant in the chest. He didn’t say a word, and swung a punch at his assistant’s chest. It was as if he had put all his strength into that punch. The assistant, who was small and skinny, stumbled backward a few steps from the punch and barely stood, but before he regained consciousness, “cross meat” rushed up again and kicked him in the stomach, and this time the assistant could no longer stand firm, covering his stomach and falling to his knees in extreme pain. The “cross meat” still did not give him a chance to catch his breath, pulled him up by his hair, slapped him left and right with a few shocking slaps, and kicked him to the ground again. The assistant was beaten by this storm of punches and kicks, and his eyes were shattered like an empty sack thrown to the ground. We were so frightened that we thought he was going to die.
From kindergarten to the Cultural Revolution, all the information we had about the PLA in our minds was: the army loved the people, the people supported the army, and the army and the people were one family; we also knew that the “three disciplines and eight notes” had been set down in Jinggangshan as rules for the treatment of ordinary people – the “Three Disciplines and Eight Notes”. -We must speak in a friendly manner, not hit or scold others, and not be overbearing. “The revolutionary discipline must be clearly remembered, and the people’s soldiers love the people everywhere. I had always thought that the PLA would only be so stable, accurate and ruthless when fighting the enemy on the battlefield, but I had never thought that this PLA comrade would be more stable, accurate, ruthless and relaxed when beating the people than when dealing with the enemy, and that the untrained people would not pose any threat to them. A time felt like falling into a KMT concentration camp or bandit’s den, I decided that this beating is inevitable, only in my heart and prayed not to be beaten into internal injuries.
At this time, the driver on the sidelines could not stand to see, probably because he and the “cross meat” between the point of indiscernible “comrades” relationship, had the courage to come forward very righteously, said, today’s incident is my work alone, and they have nothing to do. “I’m not sure what kind of thoughts were going on in his fat head, but in the temporary silence, our hearts were in our throats. For a long time, he finally decided to put down the butcher’s knife on us, and he said, “Okay, that’s it for today. Each of the four of you will write a review, and you will be let go. But next time, if you come to Nanchong and cause trouble, it won’t be so easy for you to run into my hands.
The driver’s assistant slumped on the ground and couldn’t stand up, so we went up to him and helped him up. The “cross-meat” asked someone to bring a pen and paper, and we spent about a couple of minutes writing the review. I have no recollection of what we wrote, but it was Angelica Angelica that finished the review in a panic, begging to get out of this hell.
It was the first and last time that she had been detained, and when she was released, all she could think of was that she was escaping from a hellish place. We helped the driver’s assistant, who might have been beaten to death, back to the car, crossed the river and left Nanchong. No one spoke for the entire morning, and we all felt like a stone in our hearts. The driver’s face was taut and the assistant was weakly slumped in his seat. The man who ordered my water, because he had done the most despised thing in front of everyone, was now like a traitor who had been exposed, cowering in the last row of seats until Chongqing, and no one paid any attention to him.
Chen Shupei told us that the “cross meat” we met today was the head of the Nanchong Water Transportation Company’s military management committee, and that he was a tyrant in Nanchong, and that anyone who committed a crime at his hands would not be spared a good “people-loving fist. He was famous in Nanchong for his thunderbolts, and people were all afraid to mention him. It was a miracle that only one of the four of us was beaten by him. I don’t know if the driver’s troop number really helped so much, but the other three of us were spared a beating at the hands of the “loveliest man”.
Thankfully, the passing of time has not taken away the “re-education”-derived stories of yesteryear, but today they are probably more than just stories.
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