I was born in 1957, in the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area. My parents were both working, and my grandmother brought me up after I was born. After the Great Leap Forward, we starved, and to be honest, the situation in the Heilongjiang Reclamation Area was better, but my grandmother didn’t believe in it, and she firmly believed that her hometown would never be like that, so she went back. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you’re not going to be able to get a good deal of money for your own money.
It was easy to survive until I was 6 years old, but my mother left and sent me to school a year earlier than I should have. The year the Cultural Revolution began, I was supposed to be in the third grade, but the year before that, my family moved from the Northeast General Administration of Agricultural Reclamation in Jiamusi to the 851 farm. I happened to be much better behaved suddenly, probably because the new place was too unfamiliar to me.
In 1966, I went straight to the fourth grade, where all the other teachers taught language, but the fourth grade teacher taught arithmetic, and was a man, which made me feel even stranger. Little did I know at the time, however, that it was this grade skipping, meeting the male arithmetic teacher, that started the tragedy of my elementary school career.
I was not a very naughty boy when I was a child, not a good boy, but I was generally disciplined. The teacher made us sit upright, and I could probably hold on for a few minutes each time I was stressed, and generally did not dare to do anything else while the teacher was watching. As for the naughty students who put toads in the girls’ desks and put a broom on the door before the teacher came in, I would never do it, and if someone did, I would never report it, but would probably watch with admiration. Thus, before skipping a grade, the teachers, especially the homeroom teacher, also liked me in general-why else would they skip a grade? However, after skipping a grade, I found that my current class teacher disliked me in general, and not only disliked me, but also spoke with sarcasm. This made me feel like a monk – I couldn’t figure it out. I had no choice but to avoid the teacher. Later, I found out that the class teacher didn’t like all the boys who were good at studying, and he liked the obedient girls.
I don’t remember how well she drew, but my impression was that she was young, pretty, and appreciated me so much that she always gave me five points. However, the relationship between this young and beautiful teacher and my class teacher did not seem to be very good, and sometimes they did not even say hello when they met. This, in turn, deepened the small animosity between me and my class teacher.
When the Cultural Revolution came, the first thing that was criticized was the three villages, Deng Tuo, Wu Han, and Liao Mo Sha, but after half a day of criticism, we didn’t even remember what they did for a living. It’s just that in class, students can throw rocks at each other and shoot each other in the face, and finally beat the teacher off the account. Even a good student like me, who liked to read, was quite happy not to have to go to class. We also went to school every day, and when we got there, we herded sheep, fought with each other, and attacked the city.
It wasn’t long before students older than us started fighting with the teachers. They knew more about what the revolution was about than we did, so some of the teachers in our school from poor backgrounds had bad luck. The Heilongjiang Reclamation Area, a farm built by retired army officers and soldiers, was full of small intellectuals who had been sent to the frontier in 1958 because of their bad origins. “Historical problem”, so, students want to fight teachers, really do not worry about finding a partner. In fact, when we started to fight people from bad backgrounds here, Beijing had already started to fight the capitalists.
My homeroom teacher became energetic because he was one of the few people from a good background in the school, a poor peasant from Shandong province. On the other hand, my favorite art teacher went to hell. She came from a bad background, a very bad one, and was said to be the daughter of a large landowner with family in Taiwan. She was beaten up a lot, and she fought very hard. Now, this was largely due to her stubbornness and lack of obedience, but also due to my homeroom teacher, because, at that time, the so-called Red Guards in our school actually listened to him. He didn’t show up, but the Red Guards in the front line were quite active in fighting. In those years, the Red Guards in our area had two parts, one part was the society, the main force was the aunts in our neighborhood who were not working and doing housework at home, many of them were the ones who had dumped their own partners, commonly known as gangsters (i.e., those who were looking for a second husband in addition to the main husband, which was very common in the northeast at that time), and those who joined the revolution, although they were revolutionary, but they were milder and were only satisfied with shaking their big asses and wearing red sleeves. Bill took to the streets shouting slogans. Some of the students were school children, mainly boys, while others were more aggressive and liked to fight against their teachers, especially the pretty young female teachers.
At that time, the art teacher was already pregnant, about seven or eight months pregnant. One day, a group of students hung a large metal bucket filled with stones around her neck, the iron beam of which was strangled deeply into her neck, and many broken shoes were hung around her neck. It was a time of abstinence, but sexual humiliation was ubiquitous. That night, the art teacher wiped her neck with the razor blade with which her husband had shaved. I could clearly hear moaning, but the class teacher, instead of calling a doctor, held a critical meeting on the spot. That night was the most horrible night of the Cultural Revolution that I had ever experienced.
After my art teacher’s death, my relationship with my classroom teacher became strained. He became more and more interested in humiliating me with sarcasm in class, probably because he found out about my family’s bad background and my father’s so-called historical problems. My attitude toward him changed from avoidance to open hostility, with me glaring at him when he started talking about me, and finally openly talking back. I remember one time when he was talking about me, I said back to him, “Don’t think you’re a poor peasant and you’ll eat your own money. Then he announced that I had made a reactionary remark, and that it was class revenge to attack the poor peasants and middle-peasants by saying that the poor peasants and middle-peasants eat their own money.
After that, my bad luck intensified. Almost every two days he held a criticism meeting with me in the class, and asked me to come to the stage to explain the problem. Some of the poor peasant children in the class, also followed, not only fight me, but also beat me up after class when happy, a few people together. In the end, I got anxious and fought with them every day, even though I was beaten to a bloody head and my mouth was swollen and I couldn’t even eat, but I still resisted. My teacher criticized me, saying that my resistance was a class revenge, but I was still beaten up. My fearless resistance actually scared them, and gradually people paid less attention to me.
I was beaten less and less, but the nightmare did not end. Soon, my parents were locked up in the cowshed, and at the age of 10, I had to cook for myself and take care of all the household chores, and sometimes I had to send food and supplies to my parents. I was stubborn by nature, and although I felt fear, I felt more anger and injustice. Once, when I went to the barn to deliver something to my parents, the guards dragged me into an empty room and said, “You have to express your attitude toward your parents,” meaning that I had to scold my parents in front of him. I think they had already made a number of kids like me do this, and they took pleasure in it. I was ready to be punched if I wanted to be, but I didn’t want to be yelled at anyway, not my parents.
They didn’t beat me up, but they took my bad attitude and passed it on to my school. The person in charge of the school, the so-called head of the committee, was an old cadre who had just been liberated and didn’t dare to speak up, but the person who was really in charge was my class teacher. So the next day, a notice was posted, and I was expelled.
After I learned the news, I didn’t have any expression on my face, I did what I had to do, and I still can’t remember what I thought at that time, but I stopped going to school after that. I stayed at home and read all the books with words on them, from Soviet novels with traditional characters lined up vertically to my brother’s and sister’s textbooks, not to learn anything, but to pass the time. Then I learned to cook from my neighbors, who had taken off their red cuffs, and they all treated me well.
After almost a year, my homeroom teacher was found to be center-right and stepped down after a file check revealed that he was anti-rightist. The school was run by some demobilized soldiers from the army, and one of them, who was married and lived next door to me, was quite impressed with me, so he let me go back to school.
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