Narrator：Wu Yimao｜Wu Ningkun’s daughter
Born in 1920 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, Wu Ningkun is a Chinese-American translator whose works include “The Great Gatsby”. He studied at the Foreign Language Department of Southwest United University during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, interrupted his studies to serve as a translator for the American Flying Tigers, and then studied in the U.S. In 1951, inspired by Red China, he returned to Yanjing University to teach. He was severely criticized during the political campaigns launched by the Chinese Communist Party, and was classified as an “extreme rightist” and died in a labor camp. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was rehabilitated and resumed teaching at the Beijing Institute of International Relations. In his later years, he settled in the United States and published a memoir in English about his family’s suffering in China under the Chinese Communist Party and the hundreds of millions of Chinese people.
Born in Beijing in 1958, Wu Yimao was born seven weeks before her father was classified as a “far-right activist” and dismissed from public service and sent to the Northern Wilderness. She was thus one of the youngest victims of Mao’s anti-rightist campaign. According to historical researcher Ding Lyr, about 1.5 million Chinese were persecuted during the campaign, more than 80 percent of whom were intellectuals.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP admitted that 550,000 rightists were wrongly classified and announced that all but five were rehabilitated. Deng Xiaoping, who in his capacity as General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee firmly followed Mao’s instructions, later insisted that “the anti-rightist campaign of 1957 was necessary and not wrong” but that it had been “expanded”.
In 1981, Woo Yimao studied in the United States, and in 2006 she published her autobiography in English, A Feather in the Storm, a delicate account of the struggle of a daughter of a family crushed by brutal, absurd politics to survive in turbulent times.
In the foreword to her autobiography, she writes, “I survived the revolutionary storm. Tens of millions of sufferers, including many children, did not escape. Among those innocent children were several of my friends. I hope this autobiography can serve as a historical memory and a monument to those children who lost their lives in the turmoil.”
During the interview, Woo Yimao recalled the past with a smile and tears. She said she is much better now, having often sobbed uncontrollably when talking about it in the early years. She told Voice of America that as an adult she also complained to her father, “Why did you go back to China and make us children suffer?” Her father always replied cheerfully, “If I hadn’t come back, there wouldn’t have been any of you.” Wuyimao said that it was this optimism, open-mindedness and the family’s unfailing devotion that enabled his father to finish his life at the age of 99 after so many hardships.
During the anti-rightist movement, he was classified as a “far-rightist”. At that time, tens of millions of people died of starvation during the so-called three-year natural disaster, and they were starving in prison. His “job” was to bury the dead bodies. There were dozens of prisoners sleeping on the big bed, maybe the one sleeping on your left today and the one sleeping on your right tomorrow. The day’s work was to pull the dead people that night and bury them.
My father left home when he was very young. During the war, he began to flee at the age of 17, and became a student in exile at Southwest United University, and voluntarily dropped out in his sophomore year to work as an interpreter for the SDU. After coming to the United States, he followed the SDU for a few more years, and then went to school, adding up to eight years in the United States. After the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, Yanjing University repeatedly invited him to return to teach. At that time, he was very patriotic and felt that he wanted to go back and help build the country after the war.
At that time, Li Zhengdao and he were very good friends. My father thought it was very funny and did not believe that there was really such a thing as 1984.
After he returned, he soon found himself at odds with his surroundings. In less than a year, Yan University was disbanded. After the purge movement began, my father was criticized in the school. He had a colleague named Yan who went to the criticism meeting and saw how he was being criticized, so he went home in fear and committed suicide that night.
During the Anti-Rightist Movement, he was classified as an “extreme rightist”. In his autobiography “A Drop of Tears”, he talked a lot about the so-called three years of natural disasters, when tens of millions of people died of starvation and nothing happened to them, and they were starving in prison. His so-called job was to bury the dead bodies. Dozens of prisoners slept on the big bed, maybe today they slept on your left, tomorrow they slept on your right, and in the morning they were a dead body. The day’s work is to pull the dead people that night to bury.
At that time my father felt almost, he was also fast, already hungry and swollen, ready to fall down. He sent a telegram to my mother, saying, “Come and see me for the last time. My mother described that when she saw him, his ears were transparent. This man had no oil at all, he was really skin and bones.
He was arrested on April 17, ’58. After my dad was arrested, the school told my mom, “You have to draw a line in the sand with him. You have to get a divorce, if not, you have to quit your job and get ready to go beg for food. My brother was two years old at the time and I was still in my mother’s womb. My mother was also an amazing person. She was a very devout Catholic. My mother then said: You persecute Wu Ningkun, just like when Jesus was crucified, it wasn’t him who sinned, it was you! I resigned.
I was born on the 3rd of June. I didn’t see my father for the first time in the labor camp until my third birthday. He must have looked terrible then, ragged and starving, and later my mother told me to call out for my father, and when I didn’t, I cried and screamed. At that time, I felt very scared, is this a person or a ghost?
I started to feel different from others when I was in elementary school. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when you were in the second or third grade, you were beaten up if you went to school, you were a little rightist, and there were big posters all over the school, many of them were “Down with Wu Ningkun”, “U.S. imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers “, “Wu Ningkun is a paper tiger”. I didn’t dare to go to school, so I dug a hole in the brick wall and crawled in and out. I grew up with this optimistic spirit, and I gave it a name, saying that this is my “moon door”.
At that time, the criticism, in the auditorium, he was standing on the stage, hanging a sign, “Cow devils and snake gods Wu Ningkun”, shouting slogans. Every day was a loud speaker, a trombone, and in the morning, “The East is red, the sun rises” (singing), and the day began. “Order the extreme rightist Wu Ningkun to the auditorium, the revolutionary masses criticism”, you have to go ah, but also to prepare their own armbands ah, the sign ah.
In those days, people generally drew a line in the sand with you, you were a rightist, an American agent, and a remnant of the Kuomintang, so it was too late to hide. I said at that time that I wanted to stay away from this father, and I changed my name. This “Yimao” of mine caused trouble. People said, you actually use the great leader’s surname to name your daughter, which is also his crime. During the Cultural Revolution, it was said that “three loyalties are infinite”. So I changed my name, my name is Li Zhong.
[Editor’s note: The term “three loyalties and four infinities” referred to by Wu Yimao was a political term popular at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, emphasizing the personal worship of Mao Zedong. “Three loyalties” means “loyalty to Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong Thought and Mao Zedong’s revolutionary line”; “four infinite” means “infinite love and infinite love” for Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong Thought and Mao Zedong’s revolutionary line. The “four infinite” refers to “infinite love, infinite faith, infinite worship and infinite loyalty” to Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong Thought and Mao’s revolutionary line. At that time, it was popular throughout China to do the “loyalty dance” and to “ask for instructions early and report late” to Chairman Mao. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, this expression was criticized by Chinese officials.
On the way to school, a student stopped me and told me, “You want to rebel, you want to revolutionize your father’s life. You’re going to write big-character posters for your father.” I said, “I don’t know how to write.” They said, “It’s okay if you don’t know how to write, we’ll teach you how to write.” So they took my hand and wrote with a brush, “Down with Wu Ningkun, counter-revolutionary,” and so on. I said, “I still don’t want to write it, but if I do, my father will beat me at home.” They said, “Don’t be afraid, your father will beat you, we will beat your father.”
The moment of awakening came quickly. Shortly after the Cultural Revolution began, when I was 8 or 9 years old, I went grocery shopping one day. I bought a watermelon for 20 cents and a colorful portrait of our great leader Chairman Mao and his close comrade Lin Biao on the Tiananmen Tower for 40 cents. I didn’t know if I had a cold or a fever that day, but I had a terrible headache. I sat down on the roadside.
At that time, Chairman Mao was reviewing the Red Guards, and all day long, he said, “A word from Chairman Mao is worth 10,000,” and “One look at Chairman Mao’s portrait will give you strength. I thought, “I’ll take a look at our great leader’s portrait, immediately my head will not hurt. When I opened it, my head still hurt, and when I opened it again, my head still hurt. I knew then that Chairman Mao was the bad guy, it was as simple as that. The intuition of a small child, and immediately figured it out. At that time, it was no longer in school, all day long martial arts fighting, death, shooting has been a common occurrence. I saw a lot of ridiculous things, so I had this intuition. I felt that my father was right and Chairman Mao was wrong.
In 2007, I also published an autobiography, which was translated into many languages and sold best in Germany, where they called me “China’s Anne Frank. When I was giving a speech in Germany, an old man came up to me trembling. When he came to me, he really wanted to speak and shed tears, not just one or two tears, but a lot of tears came down, and his mouth was gibbering a lot of German that I couldn’t understand. The interpreter told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz. By this time, words had no meaning. Our souls had collided. I gave him a hug and cried with him. This persecution by the Communists and the Nazis was the same.
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