In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, the Red Guards began a revolutionary tandem, traveling across the country by train without paying for it. At that time, not many people in China had ever taken a train before, so of course they had to be the first to do so. Naturally, the place the Red Guards longed for most was the capital, Beijing, and they had a strong desire to meet the great leader, Chairman Mao.
The classrooms were emptied and covered with hay and mats, the students had new blankets and coats issued by the state, and meals were free.
The Red Guards were one batch at a time, and they would be mobilized to return after a few days, or there would be too many to accommodate. I remember that on the eve of the National Day, the Red Guards from other places refused to leave, waiting to take part in the National Day parade to meet Chairman Mao. The official parade in front of Tiananmen Square was not open to foreign students, but only after the celebration of the parade and the organization of their walk through Tiananmen Square.
In those days, all students in Beijing had the opportunity to participate in the National Day Parade. Elementary school, high schools, and universities all had their own missions. Before the Cultural Revolution, it was an honor to attend the celebration every year, because it was a time to pick the best students, and the practice squads took up class time, and students who were not good students were not allowed to participate. I have been to the National Day Celebration in 1966, and although I have been to several such events before and since, this one left me with unforgettable memories.
Our task was to form characters in Tiananmen Square, which is the large area of Tiananmen Square that thousands of students formed in front of the monument, with the characters changing. (The celebration still has character formation.) After a bit of practice, we were the first to enter Tiananmen Square before midnight on September 30th (the team had to be the first to enter the square). We were dressed in white shirts and skirts, and I remember I was chosen to protect the flag, and at the front of the formation line was a row of Young Pioneers flags with a tall boy as the flag bearer. There were two other little girls escorting the flag.
I was quite proud of my costume, which was a white blouse and a red skirt with straps, but more importantly, I was able to see Chairman Mao and “inspect” the parade unobstructed from the front. It seems that we were not allowed to wear our coats that night because there was no room for them. We, a group of teenage students, were cold and sleepy in the middle of the square, sitting on the cold concrete floor, shivering and shivering, really sad.
It was hard to stay up until dawn, but it got even colder in the wee hours of the morning, and we all huddled together in a ball, unable to care about anything, and even more pitiful was the lack of food and water. I remembered that I was fine, and my father brought me meat buns from Hefeijizhai, but the buns were so cold and hard that the oil inside was curdled and hard to swallow. It was a long day from dawn to the start of the celebration at 10:00 a.m. It was as if time stood still, and every minute was a torment.
It was hard to wait until Chairman Mao climbed the Tiananmen Square, but our enthusiasm was drowned by the cold night. What was even more unbearable was that we couldn’t find a toilet, and even if we did, we kids couldn’t squeeze in, and some of us kids couldn’t hold our breath, so we just found a place to go. I don’t know how the National Day organizing committee organized the event at that time.
It was a good idea to be at the front of the parade to see the parade floats, but we hadn’t slept all night and were starving and cold. The sun was blazing again at noon, and the square was covered, drying us out, so we didn’t care what words were in the group and what fun we were having, and we were lying on the ground sleeping. I’m sure Chairman Mao and the leaders of the Central Committee would have noticed the chaos in front of the monument and the lack of order in the formation of the characters. There was no political content in the children’s minds, so there was nothing they could do, as everyone else had slept through the night and we were too tired to pick up the slack after freezing all night.
At 12:00 noon, it was easy to hope that the procession would be over, but who would have thought that there would be a large number of Red Guards coming from all over China. I don’t know if Chairman Mao was still holding on to the city tower, but we couldn’t hold on any longer. Anyway, we couldn’t hold on. We lay on the ground in a daze. It was not until 3:00 pm that the tandem finished, and finally the field was crowded toward Tiananmen Square, where we, a group of defeated children, used our last bit of strength to pull each other toward Tiananmen Square.
In the midst of the chaos, I struggled to leave the square, but I had no energy to walk home. There were no buses in Beijing on the eleventh day, so I had to walk home from Tiananmen Square. I felt like I was in a semi-comatose state. I had finished my bun, so I had to take a break on the street teeth after a few steps, and I didn’t get home until it was dark.
My parents waited anxiously at home, thinking that I had gotten lost. The show broke up at three o’clock, and I didn’t get home until seven o’clock. When I got home, I had no energy to talk, so I fell into bed and slept until the next afternoon, which was the longest sleep of my life. It was the longest sleep of my life. This experience made my young mind feel for the first time what it was like to suffer, what it was like to be hungry, what it was like to be cold, and what it was like to be unable to sleep.
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