Shi Tiesheng said that the Cultural Revolution overturned the moral values of the whole society, changed the trajectory of almost everyone’s life, and raised many deformed children.
A leaf knows the autumn. Shi Tiesheng and I talked about the twisted fate and sad ending of Wu Wenbei, a young man from Tsinghua. He came to China from France with his parents at the age of six and became a Chinese citizen. He spoke French at home with his French mother, and his pronunciation was so good that he absolutely defeated the two professors of the Foreign Language Institute. He is familiar with French history, has read a lot of French literature, and can tell the difference in pronunciation and usage between French in Saigon and French in Paris (Vietnam was a French colony), so he is very knowledgeable. After the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences moved away from Tsinghua, Ngoc Van Be moved with his parents to the dormitory of the Academy of Sciences in Zhongguanyuan.
One day around early 1968, Chen Xiaoyue came to my house and said, “Look who’s here. Wu Wenbei emerged from behind him, smiling foolishly, and the freckles on his face as a child were replaced by rows of strong bumps of different heights. After that, several of us hair children met every few weeks, exchanging all kinds of insights and experiences, and the sea was wide open. At my request, Wen Bei also came to teach me French a few times.
At that time, Chinese restaurants and friendship stores were open to foreigners or Chinese with foreign passports, and no Chinese were allowed to enter, which was very mysterious. There were guards with guns standing outside the door and security guards checking documents. This man is not convinced, the French Jacobin Party bourgeois liberalism in the blood of the dregs, face acne up, a big mouth, are people, why not let us in? When I went home and looked at myself in the mirror, my face was full of green stubble and I looked like a foreigner. So, put on a pair of old leather shoes, a leather jacket and a duckbill hat that my father brought back from France and went out.
When he arrived at the Overseas Chinese Hotel, he met the doorman and pretended he didn’t understand Chinese, but his mouth was full of French, and his brother, Wu Wenzhong, who was pretending to be a servant and carrying a bag, was lectured. The doorkeeper relies on the fundamental rice bowl, usually have a leader to lead by example, no teacher. A look at the main road is wild enough, in foreign countries is never the general cadres, did not dare to ask for documents, rushed to respectfully let go.
He came out to my house, to me and Xiaoyue and a few friends Kan in the rare goods seen inside, sausage wine foreign chocolate, frothing at the mouth, two blue eyes glazed round. I listened with pleasure and envy in my heart.
Wu Wenbei belly greedy rebellion, thirsty, but shy in the bag only eye blessing. Nearly ten people in the family, eating mainly on his father’s salary, which has free money for him to spend? The mouth curses: think at first, my mother if not for my father’s what made-up patriotic ideals, will not bring us from Paris to China to suffer in such a hellish place, the dog will not come. The dog wouldn’t have come.
I and Xiaoyue’s political awareness has long been armed to the teeth, busy saying, hurry up and stop, this can not say it, was heard by others, said you slander the Red regime, beaten into the current counter-revolutionary not to discuss with you. Tiesheng said with great emotion, yes, power and bloodshed can educate people, “Cultural Revolution” since, countless people out of the mouth, “guilty by words”, the world is full of falsehoods really say, the truth is not said, want to live people are following the tide of time to learn the mouth …… have words a said, born is the truth, more words a sentence top ten thousand sentences. The people who will simply multiply, write articles to start with tens of thousands of sentences of truth, safe and efficient, which care about the truth, falsehoods, words do not mean?
I went on to tell Tiesheng: not to mention, a chance event, Wu Wenbei really and the red regime to form a bridge! My brother Li Bo is familiar with the inside story.
Wu Wenbei once went out by train, did not wash his face for a few days, plus his foreigner looks, did not invite who did not mess with who, in Tianjin train station by plainclothes police as Xinjiang blind stream on the spot. The notices in the station were posted all over the place, resolutely cracking down on the blind stream, without the city’s household registration is not allowed to enter the city. If the ethnic minorities don’t stay in Xinjiang, what are they doing here? Are they coming to the big cities to steal things and disturb the public order? Two plainclothesmen grabbed his arms and twisted them back. The two plainclothesmen were thrown out and fell to the ground.
The police are afraid of anyone who sees them, where they have never suffered this loss? A dozen or so men swarmed over him and took him down and handcuffed him. Taken to the detention center, without saying anything to pick up the police baton a fat beating, beating Wu Wenbei rolled all over the ground. Especially the two who suffered a defeat, the hands of the vicious incomparable, Wu Wenbei fainted several times before the relief. Wake up and then a questioning, the blind “confession” is a family member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, his father Wu Xinmou. The phone call to the Institute of Mathematics, the police realized that the wrong arrest.
The security department of the mathematics institute came forward, with the account book and the letter of introduction, to the Tianjin station police station to take home Wu Wenbei, who was limped by the dictatorship. The only thing he shouldn’t have done was to resist when the two plainclothesmen took him. It’s hard to say, the police officers did not wear official clothes, how did he know that these people are police officers?
Wen Bei was discriminated against as an alien because of his foreign face, and was arrested and beaten for no reason, and felt aggrieved and extremely resentful of the police. The fire was bottled up in his stomach, so he tried to demonstrate to the police. First of all, the cooperative into jars of jam sesame paste secretly carried home, lighter flint 100 grains a bag, but also grab a few bags. Shi Tiesheng heard Wu Wenbei without reason was almost disabled, the heart of indignation, the mouth emerged: where there is oppression, where there is resistance.
The store reported to the Public Security Bureau, the dictatorship focused on the foreign blind stream without an account, which could not think of the honest “stinky old nine” son Wu Wenbei committed the crime? Police dry gas monkey, no way. At this time, a large number of cadres, citizens and children’s families …… gradually decentralized cowshed, “May 7” cadre school or rural areas to “make a difference”, the dormitory is empty. The sky is beautiful. Wu Wenbei began to steal things, many times to get.
Once, in the middle of the action, he and his brother knocked the owner home and fled. Stealing things in exchange for money, he went to Moscow Restaurant or Xin Qiao Hotel Western Restaurant to eat fried pork chops and buttered bread, and to Xidan Mall and Wangfujing Dongfeng Market to buy ice cream snowmen to eat, pursuing a bourgeois lifestyle.
In 1973, I returned to Beijing from Shaanxi Province, to report to the people of the capital “speak with” the experience of learning Mao’s writings, was also invited to taste once. Tiesheng picked up a sentence, I also ate, the snowman is really delicious, but a small cup a few bites to eat, the more you eat the more hungry. And too expensive, the price of a snowman in rural northern Shaanxi can buy several days of rations. I then use the tone of Wu Wenbei, learn from him to tell me an interesting story.
An apprentice young worker, hard to pretend to be broad, about to express romantic love to his girlfriend. Ice cream on the table, the snowman standing tall, standing in the glass goblet, immediately stuck to the girl’s two eyeballs, the world has such a beautiful thing, the spoon in the hand, embarrassed under the guy. See the snowman gradually limp, soon to melt. That small year green child said: don’t look at it, eat it, or later it should be cold! …… him when it is eating fried noodles na? If you don’t eat quickly, it will get cold!
Wu Wenbei imitated the Beijing film with a tone, the end of the inflection, like a puppy wagging its tail so natural. I laughed at it and wanted to fall to the ground. Look at this young man, a long foreign face, but speak a mouth of Beijing dialect, a perfect blend of East and West, rare in the country. Wu Wenbei later found that the Chinese family has nothing valuable, not much oil. The sword went off the rails and stole from the homes of foreigners in diplomatic apartments, causing a bad international impact.
In 1974, the brothers Wu Wenbei and Wu Wenzhong were finally arrested. It was the time of the “Cultural Revolution” when the world was in chaos. The “strict crackdown” was introduced in the chaotic times. The cases and legal procedures followed the general line of “building socialism in a fast and economical way”, and a large number of prisoners were dealt with quickly, seriously and severely.
His father, Wu Xinmou, was an internationally renowned researcher in topological mathematics, and after he returned to China in 1951, he had already survived a lot of refinements in various movements. Upon hearing the news, he immediately found the leadership to state that the children are not private property, resolutely cut off the blood kinship, completely handed over to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
When the French mother heard that her two dear sons had been arrested and sentenced to death by the “strict crackdown”, the sky fell in half when she heard that her flesh and blood love was so deep. Her nerves were on the verge of going crazy, and the few Chinese words she had learned in the past 20 years were all forgotten overnight. There was no way to sue. In desperation, he bought his salary as a large number of stamps and sat at home all day without eating or drinking, writing to his French relatives whom he had not heard from for many years, asking for help.
Wu Wenbei’s uncle, a French general on staff and deputy chief of general staff of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, found President Pompidou. The president thought that Wu Wenbei was born in France and should retain his French nationality, and personally pleaded with the Chinese government to either spare his life or extradite him to France. To no avail.
A few weeks before his execution, Wu Wenbei was tied up and paraded around Beijing. On the day of the execution, the public trial at Haidian Stadium was crowded. Some spectators saw Wu Wenbei’s face full of crossed flesh and strong bumps, saying that this kid’s looks are not good; some looked at the high nose and curly brown hair, saying that this criminal really looks like a foreigner, shooting foreigners is really relieving, who let the Eight-Power Allied Forces invade China back then, the national shame is unforgettable.
The unanimous voice was that the foreign president did not expect to put himself down and plead with China for a shameful criminal, and that the leader had a heart to heart with the grassroots, which shows that the bourgeoisie is all one hill. Who dares to defy the plea of the president of a big country? Only China! China is the only country in the world that stands out as a great and strong nation. The official propaganda is righteous and stern, the logic of the people is logical. The story of the shooting of Wu Wenbei became the after-dinner talk of the general public in Beijing.
Tiesheng listened to the story so intensely that his glasses slipped off and couldn’t be helped, being carried by his nose. After listening to my story about the shooting process, he pushed up his glasses and sighed, saying, “It’s a pity, if this person does not die, he is definitely a good material for teaching foreign languages, which is hard to find in the whole China. At that time, Ringer wind and English 900 sentences had not yet appeared in China, and young people were learning foreign languages by mouth and international phonetic symbols in textbooks, and Tiesheng was working hard on foreign languages, preparing to be a translator.
Tiesheng asked again, “How was this man when he was a child? I replied that Wu Wenbei was simple-minded and loyal when he was a child, and my brother was a living witness. When Wenbei was a child, his body was thin, his hair was yellowish-brown, he looked like his French mother, his face was so white that it was transparent, dotted with freckles, and he wore a pair of backpacks, and anyone who saw him wanted to pinch a hand on his face. Peculiar looks, no one in the children to play with him, and insist on following Xiaoyue worship my brother as the boss, sincerely join the organization. My brother committed a week, one suspected that he is not capable, short to fight useless, the second looks like a foreigner, take it out to look like the team is not pure enough. He sincerely wanted to join, arguing that he ran fast and let Huaguang help to intercede. In order to show bravery, open his hand to reveal a large fleshy insect moving and rolled body, is the green worm on the acacia tree, commonly known as the hanging ghost, in front of the group put the live worm in the mouth, chew it a few times to swallow, black and green worm water dripping from the corners of the mouth. My brother and the group took a look, the ability is real, were stunned, and then became a good buddy.
My brother Sun Libo’s reminiscence article wrote: “young and teenage Wu Wenbei, honest and heavy friendship, optimistic and cheerful. Wenbei took the path of crime, violated the laws of the country, and should be sanctioned by the law. But although he had hurt people, no fatalities; the total amount of stolen property is also limited, the crime is not to death. However, during the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the judiciary was not independent and the law served politics. Wen Bei’s theft, which involved a foreigner, became a political issue during the Cultural Revolution, and he was caught in a typical case, and was paraded around the city with great severity and speed, and even the French state leaders interceded, but he was not spared death, which was sad and lamentable. Later, his brother Wenzhong was pardoned and released to France, which also shows from another perspective that their case was sentenced heavily at that time.”
In 1978, Shi Tiesheng published his novel Brothers, about a hot-blooded young man who committed a crime, ending with the words, “I saw the shooting of Yu Zhiqiang, but I didn’t see it too clearly. The crowd shouted slogans in anger, followed by a gunshot. I remember a man beside me humorously saying, ‘What’s going on? His blood is red too.'”
Everyone is born a blank sheet of paper, and juvenile delinquency is not an innate decision; there must be multiple social environmental factors. It is clear that the motivation for crime must be found more in the system and culture. Improve the system and there will be hope for humanity. All human blood is red.
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