When an excavator dissects a tomb, if he finds that he and the tomb owner had a one-sided acquaintance during his lifetime, I am afraid that such a chance will not even have a chance in a million? However, after retreating from the world for more than a decade, I found an old friend, albeit a one-time friend from fifty years ago.
This person is Cai Chuo, the owner of the tomb listed as No. 2 in the Questionnaire on the Status of Dead Rightists.
When I agreed with Yao Jun to seriously discuss the case by case of the tomb owners in the Questionnaire, I had absolutely no idea that the ninety-four tomb owners in this surviving Questionnaire would have any personal connection to me, because I was not yet seven years old at the time of the big case.
Back then, no matter what happened to the parents at home, or spared, as long as it can still be concealed, it is difficult for children to learn the details from the mouth of the elders. This certainly contained a painstaking effort by parents to love and care for their children, as Yao Jun described Castor Zhang’s wife Jing Meiying as an example [1]. The only “rightist” I ever heard of from my father, who was already tight-lipped, was a man named “Cai Fei,” and I only heard of him twice.
The first time was when the leaders of the organization announced that Cai Fei had been designated as a rightist, and my father went home and whispered to my mother about the list of rightists who had been designated that day. Since my father had decided to defend himself by “making friends from afar and attacking near” since he was transferred to Beijing, he never made deep friends with his colleagues in the ministry and never invited them to his home, so my mother did not know any of them. The reason why the whole family was horrified to talk about Cai Fei was because the cartoons Cai Fei had drawn for me were still taped to my bedside! My father didn’t want me to know what was going on, but instructed my mother to go to my room and remove the cartoons. Of course I didn’t comply, so I cried loudly for a while, but it ended in my defeat. Later I hid outside my parents’ room and overheard such inexplicable and sporadic words as “Cai Fei …… Right ……”, and only then did I understand approximately: something much more important than cartoons was happening in the world today. The world now has a much more important event than cartoons.
My father and Cai Fei did not have any interaction in the past. The first time I met Cai Fei was at a party in the old calendar year of 1957. In those days, there was always some kind of party under the festival. I can’t remember if it was the second day of the new year or the third day of the new year, but the union of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was going to hold a Peking Opera gala that day, and it was dressed up by the employees who were fans of the opera themselves. It so happened that my father brought my grandmother from Changsha to the capital for a short stay, and she was a fan of opera, regardless of her level. The first time I saw her, she was a fan of the opera. In order to please the old lady, usually do not participate in such activities of the whole family, but this time it is all out to the organ auditorium to see the performance outside the end of the stream.
I think I am not yet to the age of elementary school, to this kind of long even out of the folding play does not have the slightest interest, in the seat will be restless up. In order not to spoil everyone’s fun, an elder in the audience took out a piece of paper, and with a few strokes, drew the characters on the stage vividly, and handed it to me to see. Of course, children are happy to see such a rare object, and probably kept me steady until all the performances were finished, so that the adults finally breathed a sigh of relief. My parents got up and thanked the colleague who had “saved the day”. After asking each other his name, my father learned that his name was “Cai Fei”.
When I got home, I was so happy that I put the cartoon on my bed. My father told me that the one who knelt on the ground and would say “I don’t want to, my lord” was Cui Liying in “Three Reluctances”, while the two martial artists who fought in the dark were Ren Tang Hui and Liu Lihua in “Three Forks of the Road”. It was the character cartoons I got on that occasion that gradually made me interested in Beijing opera in the following years.
I heard the name Cai Fei again a few years after I overheard my parents talking about how he was designated as a rightist and sent to “reform through labor”. This time, my father spoke of Cai Fei with a more somber look and a more subdued voice. At this time, it was already the beginning of June 11, and the whole country was already starving, not only the performance of the old calendar year could not be discussed at all, but even the two taels of sesame sauce and half a catty of pork rationed for the holidays had to be broken. About after the trials and tribulations of previous campaigns, my father knew that the more cautious he was at this time, the more careful he had to be.
When I saw that my father did not look right when he came home and did not say a word at the dinner table, I began to suspect that I had been naughty at school and that the teachers had found parents to complain, so I acted extraordinarily well. After dinner, my parents locked up in their room to talk in a whisper, and I was back to my old tricks, hiding behind the door and eavesdropping. It slowly became clear that they were not talking about my performance at school, but about the death of Cai Fei, who had drawn cartoons for me and was later sent to labor camp.
The last thing I heard was a long sigh from my father: “All pay more attention to it, I do not know which day will be our turn. ……”
I was already in the third grade, more or less know a little bit of the world, that long sigh on my shock is still in effect today. I still think that my father’s words about Cai Fei’s death were a lingering shadow on my heart, even though my father and he did not have much friendship, and he and I only had a one-sided friendship. Later, the prophecy came true, my father’s fate was finally fulfilled in the Cultural Revolution.
So, when I opened the Questionnaire and suddenly found the name of the tomb owner listed in the second tomb as “Cai Cuo”, the original work unit for the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, I couldn’t help but look down carefully and hurriedly asked Yao Xiaoping for details. When I was told: “Cai Cuo was historically an artist and could draw cartoons”, I basically decided that this Cai Cuo was probably the Cai Fei I remembered.
According to some people, people with high perception are bad at remembering; and people with good memory are not good at perception. After I was convinced of this assertion, I read Mr. Qian Zhongshu’s statement that “memory cannot be relied upon” and thought that this was the sentiment of Mr. Qian’s kind of enlightened people. I secretly think my own qualifications are mediocre, so I am quite proud of my memory, such as the pricing of high-priced food in difficult times, the black market exchange for the food stamps needed to Hen’s eggs and so on, so far, backwards and forwards.
However, in order to be sure that Cai Cuo is Cai Fei, I still need to do a few things to confirm my memory. One: Why was Cai Cuo called Cai Fei by his father?
Even though my father may have misunderstood when he first exchanged names with Cai Cai at the Peking Opera Gala, when the rightist list was announced, the organization could not be wrong about the names of the subordinates. Moreover, since what happened to Cai Cuo caused such a big shock to my father, he would also confirm it afterwards.
The explanation for this is my “mistake of ear”. Since my father was a native of Changsha, it was difficult to distinguish between the guttural “drink” and the labiodental “fu” in Changsha (and in fact many southern languages, including Japanese). In normal speech, it’s not a problem in context, but when it comes to names of people and places, you need to be sure, for example, “Huang” and “Fan” are not distinguishable.
Second: I remember my father saying that Cai Cuo was sent to the northeast for labor reform, but why is the record in the “investigation form” that he died at Qinghe farm in the suburbs of Beijing?
I asked Yao Xiaoping, the discoverer of the questionnaire, and Yao conveyed the explanation he got from the experts. It turns out that although the Xingkai Lake Labor Farm is located at the border of Heilongjiang Province, it is directly under the Fifth Division (Labor Reform Division) of the Beijing Public Security Bureau. When we had good relations with the Soviet Union, the Xingkaihu farm was close to the border of the Soviet Union, so it was very safe for the “reactionaries” to be placed there. If the reformers escaped to the Soviet side, the Soviets would immediately deport them and hand them over to the Chinese side. Moreover, the superiors had already approved that any fugitive returned by the Soviets would be treated as “treason” and could be executed on the spot without having to be reported. But later on, the Soviet Union and China exchanged hostility, and the location there as a “labor farm” was not safe anymore. Therefore, most of the rightist prisoners from Xingkai Lake Labor Reform Farm moved to Qinghe Farm in the suburbs of Beijing, and finally the whole farm was transferred to the local management of Heilongjiang. My father only knew that Cai Cuo and his group of rightists were escorted to the northeast for labor reform, but he did not know the subsequent changes. On the other hand, this also explains a mystery: a large number of labor reformers died during the three-year famine, which culminated in the years 60 and 61, but why there are only five dead people buried at the Xingkaihu Labor Reform Farm in the Survey, and all of them died in 1958 and 59 (the latest grave owner, No. 62, Chen Yihe, a teacher at Beijing 35th Middle School, died on November 11, 1959). With this background explanation, we understand the reason for this. If we look at the majority of grave owners in the two cemeteries of Qinghe and Beiyuan farms in the Survey, we find that they all died in these two years, exactly at the same time as the mass death of the whole country due to the famine [2].
With these two things to clear up the doubts, I can conclude that: the grave owner of the second burial is Cai Chuo, whom I used to have a one-sided acquaintance with when I was young. Moreover, according to the Investigation Form, I can roughly sketch Cai Cuo’s life trajectory from his dismissal from the institution, detention to the farm labor camp until his death, which lasted more than two years and ten months, as follows.
Cai was interned on February 16, 1958, then transferred to the Xingkai Lake Labor Reform Farm in Heilongjiang, and then moved to the Qinghe Farm in Beijing in 1960 to continue his labor reform. He died at 5:10 a.m. on December 21, 1960, in the ward of the labor camp at the age of fifty-one. His body was buried in Yujialing Cemetery, Qinghe Farm, No. 2, Row 6.
According to the Investigation Form, on December 21, the day Cai Cuo died, the farm notified Cai Cuo’s wife Jiang Chonglun. Cai Cuo belonged to the dismissal from public service, according to the original unit is no longer involved, the farm even immediately notified, my father will certainly not soon learn. In terms of time, this point is also consistent with my memory.
It is worth mentioning that there is also a column in the Questionnaire with the words “not on parole due to overseas relations”. As we know, most of the “medical parole procedures” are for prisoners who are seriously ill and need “medical parole” for humane treatment. According to the information in the “death diagnosis” column, Cai Cuo “historically suffered from heart disease and died of heart valve disease and tuberculosis”. Referring to the information of other tomb owners, the same column is not filled out with the content of “whether to apply for medical parole”, which shows that Cai Cuo’s condition was very serious at that time, perhaps someone had proposed “medical parole”, but due to The suggestion of “medical parole” may have been made, but it was rejected because of “overseas relations”. It was the height of the famine in those days, and starving people were commonplace, not to mention a handful of prisoners in labor camps. In order to pass the buck, Cai Cuo’s old illness could just be used as an excuse for the cause of death. However, the authorities may not have thought that the subtle differences in filling out the information on the tomb owner gave away the mystery: knowing that Cai Cuo was suffering from a serious illness, but not approving “medical parole” simply because of “overseas relations”, which ultimately caused the death of the tomb owner, is also to blame. Of course, this “press down the gourd to float up the ladybug” explanation today seems to be stretched, but back then it was completely justifiable.
Finally, I would like to mention the column of “Reasons for Correction” in the Investigation Form, in which the crime is described in detail, in addition to the cliché of “supporting Chu Anping’s anti-party remarks”: ” …… drew a cartoon of ‘A shadow moving on the other wall, suspecting that the old man had come’, slandering the Party’s anti-rightist struggle as a catch-22,” and so on.
More than twenty years later, the right was instantly rehabilitated, the archives were destroyed, leaving only ninety-four tomb owners of the name of the book on the streets, almost a few orphans. So it seems that CaiChuan had foresight back then, but it is a pity that this gave up a life in vain.
This also proves once again that CaiChuan has the talent of cartoons, is certainly the CaiChuan that I remember, the CaiChuan with whom I only had a one-sided friendship. My memory is not wrong.
This result makes me one to be happy and one to sigh. The joy is that my memory is still very good, fifty years ago as if it were yesterday; sigh is that, according to the law of enlightenment and memory complement each other, it seems that I am indeed a person of mediocre enlightenment, and the analysis of the second tomb owner Cai Cuo, only so reluctantly shallow and poor knowledge.
Notes.
[1] Yao Xiaoping: In Search of the Disappearing Back
[2] Cao Shuji, Population Deaths and Their Causes in China, 1959-1961
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