In December 1968, after Mao Zedong’s latest directive on the movement of intellectual youth to the countryside, the revolutionary committees at all levels launched a powerful propaganda offensive, inviting local commune cadres from the countryside where we were going to settle down to give speeches in schools. In my memory, the cadres of the commune made the countryside look picturesque, just like the picture of the new socialist countryside portrayed in a song we were familiar with at that time: “White clouds hang from the hills, layers of terraced fields spread out, trees shade the blue sky, and ferries sail in the morning sun”.
With this kind of preparation, together with the impression left by some movies before the Cultural Revolution, such as “Li Shuang Shuang,” “The Young Men of Our Village,” “Chaoyang Gulch,” “Silkworm Flower Girl,” and so on, we have a pretty good impression of the countryside, and we can’t say that we aspire to the countryside of Cangxi where we are going to settle, but we don’t have any special resistance or aversion to it. It’s just that no one is willing to be a new socialist farmer.
Propaganda was one aspect of this; another was the use of various strong measures to implement Mao’s instructions. Neighborhood committees in every street called together all the activists in the area and went from house to house to do the work – mobilizing those of good composition and coercing those of bad composition, with the single purpose of getting parents to send their children to the countryside as soon as possible.
In fact, except for the military and local leaders of a certain rank, there were almost no middle school students among the civilian population who were brave enough and able to carry on with their lives, because we would eventually have our household registration and food ties forcibly revoked, so that even if we stayed in the city, we would not be able to live.
My brother and I left home at the same time as the first group of rural youths in Beibei District, Chongqing.
The night before we left, my mother, who had rarely cooked in her life (because there was a cafeteria and none of the faculty members cooked at home), used the sugar and vegetable oil she had saved to make pies for us to take with us on the road. All the neighbors’ aunts and uncles came to visit and said some good wishes. The words were all nice, but the words were a little bit sad.
I stood by the kitchen door and listened to my mother tell the neighbors that when she was little, when she was about to go to kindergarten, she would sit there alone facing the wall and cry for half a day. …… There was no light on in the kitchen, so my mother did her work by the light coming in through the window. I didn’t see my mother cry, but I did, and turned around and went into my room, not wanting my mother and the neighbors to see me.
The next morning, when it was still dark, my brother and I got up, each carrying a large roll of bedding, and left the house. My mother could not see us off, for she was a “class enemy” purged during the so-called “purge of the class ranks” movement, and was being roundly condemned to labor camps in the name of the revolution, without any freedom of movement, and could not leave the Western Normal campus. When we opened the door, my mother’s voice could be heard in the darkness: “Be careful on your way, and write back as soon as you arrive. My mother’s simple and plain farewell was full of deep maternal love and her worries and concerns.
When I left the house, the cold air of early spring immediately surrounded me, and I involuntarily shivered. As my siblings were going to meet up with their classmates, we broke up when we walked up the main road.
After my brother and I broke up, we went to Li Xiaoqun’s house. Li Xiaoqun and I were in the same class from kindergarten through middle school and belonged to the same “Mao Gen” group of friends, so we chose to settle down.
Xiaoqun’s mother dropped us off at the school.
The basketball court on the left side of the school gate was filled with trucks that sent Zhiqing to the school. The truck we were riding in was the front of the line, not joining the large group on the street for the farewell parade. When the engine started to run, students burst into tears, parents crying and shouting as they sent their children to the basketball court.
The reason for such anguish was that the future was clouded. Although no one dared to disagree with the latest instructions in public, parents and middle school students had little confidence in being new socialist farmers, and in private people had many doubts about how much they could do in the vast world without wages or a fixed national food quota.
Parents’ worries were more specific and long-term: could children growing up in cities support themselves? Even if we can provide some allowance for the child now, what about in the future? What to do when your child is older and has a host of life issues to deal with ……
When we arrived at Hechuan, many students were still crying, but I stopped crying, not because I didn’t want to, but something worse than crying happened. Amidst all the vomiting, there was only one wish left, and that was to reach my destination quickly.
It was a two-day bus ride from Beibei District, Chongqing to Cangxi County. The gravel roads were dusty, and I didn’t know how many kilometers per hour the car could drive, but the first day I could only reach Nanchong City. The campus of Nanchong Normal College was vacant, and was used to accommodate the young people.
That night, when we heard about the Jumbo Island incident from the college’s radio broadcast, many of us, especially the male ones, were secretly hoping that the incident would expand into a large-scale war, in which case we might not have to go to the countryside, even if we had to sacrifice ourselves as soldiers to protect the motherland, it would be better than being farmers in the countryside.
But the next day, as if nothing had happened, the trucks carrying us continued on our way to our destination early in the morning. Once the thousands of high school students arrived, the small county town, with only one street, seemed to be full of intellectuals.
On the way from Nanchong to Cangxi, the intellectuals became restless, and during a break on the way, some male intellectuals went to the roadside to catch other people’s chickens, and there were also incidents of fighting. The Cultural Revolution destroyed the original order, and the students, who had just left the battlefield of martial arts, were like TNT, exploding at the first touch, not only ignoring the greeting, but also having the arrogance of big city people and the rudeness refined in martial arts, completely ignoring the small county towns along the way.
After arriving in Cangxi, some male intellectuals started to make trouble again in the county town, going to stores or eating in restaurants without paying for their food, and then leaving like bandits in the mountains. The bullied locals dared not speak out, and hated them with a gnashing of teeth.
Because of the collective trouble on the road and in the county, the Cangxi County Revolutionary Committee was alarmed from top to bottom. The leaders and teachers of the “Military Propaganda” and “Work Propaganda” teams led by the schools were summoned to the committee, and we never saw them again until the next day, when we left for our respective districts and communes.
There were several large empty granaries, and straw was laid on the ground for us to sleep in, similar to the way the Red Guards were received everywhere during the tandem. At night, we ate at a basketball court in the county town, with no table and all the food on the floor.
The county GRC treated us quite warmly, with a big pot of roast pork that was not easy to eat in those days. But in the process of eating, for some unknown reason, some intellectuals raised their rice bowls high up in the air and dropped them on the ground with a bang. Such a noise immediately triggered a domino effect, and the youths raised their rice bowls and swung them down, after which the basketball court was scattered with rice and pieces of clay porcelain bowls, making a mess.
After dinner, when everyone was back inside the grain station, all the soldiers from the county armed forces surrounded the station to keep out the stragglers. Two machine guns were set up on the outside facing the big iron gate of the grain station, and snowy searchlights illuminated the inside and outside of the gate as if it were daylight. The fact was that we were imprisoned in the grain depot and could not get out.
When they learned of this, many male intellectuals assumed the stance of an armed fight, shouting furiously that they would rush outside, and some of them got into the cab of the truck that was taking us to the countryside and honked loudly. The more sensible ones ran to the gate and tried to reason with the soldiers through the closed iron gate.
When we went to look, the area near the gate was crowded with people, and the students sang in unison in front of the heavily armed county squadron soldiers outside the gate: “Our Liberation Army is good, the Liberation Army is good, the red flag of Mao Zedong Thought is raised high, raised high ……”.
The students tried to move the soldiers by singing songs of support for the army, recalling the friendship between soldiers and civilians that had existed during the armed struggle. But the faces of the PLA soldiers were expressionless, standing statues cold and frosty outside the iron gate, unresponsive to the students’ call of affection.
Fortunately, most of us were clear-headed enough not to climb over the walls and gates and clash with the soldiers, thus avoiding bloodshed. It was not until much later that we heard from sources that the county armed forces received instructions from the military sub-district in Nanchong that night that if the students really dared to rush outside, they could shoot at non-vital parts of the students’ bodies and arrest those in charge, and that the prison vans were ready and waiting outside the food station.
We watched from the front gate of the grain store for a while, but inside and outside the iron gates were two worlds of ice and fire, and the agitated intellectuals had no opponent for a while, so they slowly turned off their fires, and everyone returned to the barn one after another to prepare for sleep.
At this time, an even more terrible news spread quickly among the Zhiqing. There was a doctor in the granary (we didn’t see the doctor, we heard that he was arrested later), and we don’t know why and how he came in (the gate was blocked), but he spread the word among the Zhiqing that there were many lepers in Cangxi County, and that there was a leper village in Xinguan Commune, Shanchuan District that took in patients.
The news spread among the Zhiqing with a speed comparable to that of the Internet nowadays, and Wang Yuangui, Xiaoqun, and I were assigned to settle in Xinguan Commune in Shanchuan District. As early as the mobilization stage, the high school students in Beibei District had heard that there was leprosy in Cangxi, and they all pretended to be afraid. The news spread by the doctors brought the school legend to life, and even more so to our immediate and imminent reality.
Our quick reaction to the news was to wail. After crying in the dark for a while, our fear-covered brains slowly had some cracks to think about, and we began to realize our situation more clearly – we were no longer sheltered dolls, and crying alone would not solve any problems.
So, we found our classmate Chen Xiaomin, who had settled in the Zheshui Commune in Wulong District, and after discussion, several girls unanimously made a firm decision to go to the Zheshui Commune instead.
The next morning, the soldiers who had blockaded our residence withdrew, and the intellectuals from each school also split up and got on the bus to prepare for the last leg of the journey to the district, commune or production team where they had settled – if the production team happened to be near the road. At this point, we three girls were sitting on the side of the road at the grain depot, crying, dying to get on the bus we were supposed to get on.
The bus had already started, and the driver honked his horn to urge us to get on the bus and return to our seats, but we sat on the ground and resolutely refused to get on the bus, stranding a group of thousands of people from several schools in the grain depot because of us. The lead teacher and the master of the propaganda team were very anxious, and they tried to persuade us, but our mouths were almost broken. We simply said, “No, we will either go to another commune or buy our own tickets to Beibei.
Naturally, it was impossible for us to go back to Beibei. After some discussion with the leaders and teachers of the military and labor propaganda team and the cadres of the commune where we were to receive the Zhiqing, they agreed to our request and transferred us to the Zhishui Commune in Wulong District. With tears in our eyes and the joy of victory, we climbed into the truck in which several other students were riding, and the storm finally subsided.
In fact, our behavior at that time was very childish, perhaps because of pure childishness, we were able to adopt such a paranoid and extreme way regardless; we were able to be so unshakable in the face of adversity; we were able to bind each other tightly together, tied into a broken arrow, and finally achieved our goal.
After we made a fuss at the grain station in the county, Cangxi authorities transferred us to Xinmin Team 5 of Zheshui Commune, with three female classmates, including Chen Xiaomin, in the adjacent Xinmin Team 6, and three male classmates in Xinmin Team 3.
Since there was no road access to Zheshui Commune, all of us got off at the Borough Commune, which is more than 20 miles away from Zheshui Commune, had lunch, and then sat on a stage waiting for the production team to pick us up. It was raining, the kind of light rain that falls in the fall, but it covered the mountains and the landscape with a hazy mist.
As the sky darkened, the path that stretched out from the mountain was glowing white, as if a layer of oil had been splashed on it. The visitors from each production team took away their intellectuals one after another, and only then did the feeling of being alone in a strange land really emerge.
Three students from the sixth team were taken away first. We were temporarily relocated in the county, so it was already dark by the time the production team sent someone to pick us up. I had never been on a road like this before, and as I walked, I remembered a saying by Lu Xun, to the effect that there is no road in the world, but as many people walk on it, it becomes a road. The sheep intestine path beneath our feet should be such a path, trodden out by people who walk.
The farmers carried our luggage on their backs and walked ahead with the wind, but we slipped two steps at a time and fell three steps at a time. The farmers always replied that it was almost there, almost there, and that it was “almost there” for two or three hours before we reached the production team.
We left our luggage, not caring at all about where we were going to live, and went straight to Xinmin Team Six. A few students from Team 6 were housed in a large courtyard called “Hetanggou,” which was very close to us, and we could get there in ten minutes if we walked fast enough. On the day of their arrival, their house had not yet been equipped with a door, but only two beds and a large square cabinet with local grain in it. A kerosene lamp made from an ink bottle was placed on top of the closet, the dim flame of which flickered tirelessly on the wick.
The room was crowded with onlookers, men, women and children. The secretary of the brigade came and asked someone to cook for us, and asked very thoughtfully if one kilogram of rice was enough for one of you. We were shocked at the secretary’s words, and were happy when he replied, “We can’t eat that much rice in one day.
The secretary then gave us a precautionary measure, telling us that we were short of wood to burn. This was a problem we had never heard of or even felt in the city, and the fact that the secretary had just met with us and told us so candidly explained the seriousness of the problem. The lack of firewood and the lack of food should be in the same sequence, the problem of uncooked rice and the lack of food.
I became concerned and asked the secretary what to do. The secretary didn’t tell me what to do, but said, “Let’s make up our minds. The difference between the local accent and Chongqing’s accent was so great that I misheard it as “burning lard”. This was even more surprising than the lack of firewood I had heard. This caused the room full of onlookers to burst into laughter.
The peasants gradually dispersed, and the black hole in the house became weird and scary because there was no door. The six girls looked at each other. I don’t remember if we ate the food the farmers cooked for us or not, but I do remember that no one was in the mood to talk much, and after a while of silence, Chen Xiaomin, three of them, and Xiaoqun all said they wanted to go home. I couldn’t say I was going home. Although the countryside before me was a far cry from the one I had imagined at home, I knew that our home was different from others, and there was no way out if I ran back.
When I was in Cangxi County, I was afraid of leprosy, but now that we’ve moved to a different place, there is no leprosy anymore (I later learned that there is still a leper in our commune, but he lives in another large group 20 to 30 miles away), and there is no reason to make a fuss about going back. Wang Yuangui said she would not go either. After some discussion, we decided to send them away the next day, and then we would return to the production team.
That night, the six of us didn’t dare to lie down and sleep, and we didn’t open our backpacks, so we sat on the same bed, leaning on each other and fell asleep.
In the morning, just after dawn, before the farmers woke up, we carried our luggage and, knowing nothing about the distribution of administrative regions in Cangxi County, we followed the road from memory in the direction of Cypress Commune. No one thought about what to do in Burubian, which is just a commune with no regular transportation and no station.
We were still minors who had just left our parents and had no one to rely on. If anything happened to us on the road, no one would know about it, and no one would care to look for us.
The mountain in front of us was so high that we had to climb it at all costs, because we had come down from the top. The day before, the peasants had carried our luggage, and we had gone downhill with our empty hands; this day we had not eaten for almost two meals, and were hungry, carrying our heavy luggage up the mountain by ourselves. It was not easy to reach the top of the mountain, but before we got out of the main group, we couldn’t walk any further in the territory of the third Xinmin team, and didn’t know where to go.
At that time, several high school students who had settled in the Red Flag Brigade were taken to their production teams by farmers, who happened to be passing by Xinmin Team No. 3. Although they couldn’t call us by name, when they learned that we were running home with our luggage on our backs, they assumed the attitude of big brothers, educating us, “You fools, do you think you can go back like this? Even if you ran back, you’d have nothing to do with household registration or food, what would you do? You’re not the only ones here, there are so many of us. Go, go, go. We’ll send you back to the production team. Afterwards, the farmers who picked them up helped us pick up our luggage and took us back to Xinmin Teams 5 and 6 before we left for our own production teams.
From that day on, we officially began our life as farmers.
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