In the first sultry week of July 1982, I took the examination—all the questions required textbook answers, and I had all the textbooks in my head. When the scores were published, I was among the highest in the province. I applied to study English literature at Fudan University in Shanghai, one of the most prestigious schools in China, but many relatives advised my parents to let me stay in Xi’an, because, as the oldest son, I had responsibilities to my parents and siblings. Father overruled their concerns. “A man should be able to go far for the big things in life and then come back to repay the kindness of his parents with his success.” Father considered my good luck to be the blessing of Grandpa and my ancestors, something he took very seriously. When the admission letter came, Father wanted to add another layer of paint to the coffin; Mother said, “Don’t be so superstitious.”
In my teenage years, I had always wanted to escape from my family, to get as far from Xi’an as I could, but when the time came to leave for Shanghai in September, I found it hard to say good-bye. Mother was the only one who had been to Shanghai, and she remembered the busy shopping streets and the bright neon lights. “Many young people in Shanghai long for bourgeois lifestyles—they pay a lot of attention to how they look. Don’t be corrupted. Live simply and focus on your studies,” she said.
Through a friend who was helping with Grandma’s funeral plans, Father booked me a hard seat train ticket, which allowed me to stay in the less crowded sleeper section. “See, you also benefit from all those New Year’s visits, not just your grandma.” Father winked at me. When the train clanked and rumbled away from the station where my parents stood waving on the platform, I cried like a child. I had never felt so vulnerable. My letters home were all about how much I missed Xi’an and Grandma until Father wrote, telling me to focus on my studies. “Your letters make Grandma and Mother cry. Don’t be too sentimental and make them sad. A real man places his career above his family. Get yourself a bowl of noodles. It will make you tough.” I listened and stopped writing letters and, as fall turned into winter, Grandma receded in my mind, and the big city of Shanghai began to take up more and more of my time—even the strong chlorine taste of its water, which I had found revolting, began to taste normal to me.
In my first year in college, I tried to live up to Father’s expectations, aiming for straight A’s in all my required classes, and I became active in the Communist Youth League. Before long, the Party secretary of my department held a long talk with me, encouraging me to apply for Party membership, which he said was courting young people who were both Red (politically active) and knowledgeable (academically sound). Father was pleased with the news but warned me not to spend too much time on politics, which he said could be risky and fickle. He advised in a letter: “Intellectuals have always been scapegoats in past political campaigns. Be careful.” My interest in the Party did not last long. When the second semester started, I became preoccupied with a different set of new ideas, which I found liberating.
In the early 1980s, the government’s open-door policy had turned Fudan University into a hotbed of discussions about long-banned Western political and philosophical ideas, China’s equivalent of glasnost. In criticizing the brutal excesses of the Cultural Revolution, many emboldened intellectuals urged the government to reexamine the applicability of Marxism in China and called for respect for human values and dignity under socialism. On campus, Communism was beginning to lose ground and students turned to Western philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre for guidance. Following the death of Sartre in 1980, Chinese scholars translated many of his essays and plays into Chinese. By the time I arrived in Shanghai, Sartre was treated like a pop icon. If a student did not read about existentialism or possess a copy of The Studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of his works in Chinese, he would be considered unscholarly and a loser. When possible, we peppered our conversations with Nietzsche’s quote “God is dead” or Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “If God doesn’t exist, everything else is permitted” in the same way that Red Guards cited Chairman Mao’s words during the Cultural Revolution. In classrooms that were fully packed, I attended lectures on Sartre and Nietzsche organized by the philosophy department, which was expected to focus on Marxism. To escape censorship, the lectures were conducted in the name of “taking a critical view of Western philosophies to deepen our understanding and appreciation of Marxism,” even though the professors were avid followers of Sartre. Initially, I often skipped my regular classes and showed up at lectures on existentialism merely for the sake of being seen as a person of substance. However, as the semester ended, many of the existentialist views, such as Nietzsche’s “will to power” and Sartre’s “authentic existence” began to make sense and resonate with me, despite the fact that my understanding of them was still limited. All of a sudden, I found the teachings that I had received from Father and my teachers in high school—filial piety, obedience, loyalty to the Party and striving for good grades—seemed outdated and irrelevant to my future. I longed for freedom without the constraint of a regimented life. I felt ready to make my own choices in life, acting on my own, not according to what my family or the government demanded.
Intoxicated as I was by these existentialistic ideas, I began resenting the letters from Father, who continued to dispense what I deemed to be “archaic” advice—concentrate on your studies, refrain from speaking your mind in public, and postpone dating girls until graduation. In one of his letters, Father mentioned the coffin, which he was planning to move out of our house because of Grandma’s increasing phobia about death. It so happened that I had just seen a new stage production of a well-known Chinese play called The Peking Man, which portrayed a declining aristocratic family in Beijing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Onstage throughout the play was a coffin that resembled Grandma’s, which had been made for a patriarchal figure in the family. The patriarch, a scholar and former official, spent his waning days recalling the luxurious years of the past, even as his family was disintegrating into chaos and facing financial bankruptcy. His sole comfort lay in the coffin, to which he added a new layer of paint every year in the belief that the more times a coffin was painted, the better his life would be in the afterworld. The play provided me with a perfect excuse to discuss Father’s obsession with Grandma’s coffin and educate him about my newly acquired philosophical tenets. In a letter home, I told Father about The Peking Man, calling the coffin in the play a symbol of suffocating and death-inducing “feudalistic moral and cultural values.” I likened Father’s obsession to that of the patriarchal character, who remained oblivious to the changes in the world. Then I declared to him that I was no longer interested in Grandma’s coffin as well as its associated meanings. I wanted to live my own life. Then I regaled Father with what I had learned from Nietzsche—the three stages of the spirit. I said I wanted to be a camel, absorbing all the knowledge, questions, and sufferings in life. I wanted to be empowered like a lion, conquering fear, self-doubt, and adversities, and then have a fresh start, like a newly born baby, free from restrictions and worries.
I waited anxiously for Father’s reply. Four months passed and I still heard nothing from him. A week before the summer break, Father finally sent me a short note and money for my train fare. In the note, he wrote in a tone that I construed as being sarcastic: “I can see that your mind is becoming very sophisticated. Your remarks about the meanings of life are beyond my grasp. Chairman Mao used to say, ‘The more books one reads, the more reactionary one becomes.’ He might be right. I know you want to live a free life, but in China, asking for too much freedom can land you in jail. Please concentrate on your classes and do not waste time reading those useless books. It doesn’t matter if you want to be a camel or a lion, you still need to abide by the rules of society. If you are not careful, the government could crush you like a bug. Come home. Grandma misses you.”
I felt the urge to write back with a more vehement response, but realizing
that I needed money for a trip that I was taking that summer, I gave up. When I was at home in the summer, Father and I never mentioned Sartre or the coffin. One day, when a group of friends gathered at our house, we bantered about politics, especially about the recent gossip relating to Mao’s indulgent private life. A friend who was attending a college in Beijing made a casual remark. “Old Mao was such an immoral dictator and a peasant bandit. He and the Party have done their share of ruining China.” Father overheard his comments. Fear spread across his face. After my friends left, he closed the window, as he always did when sensitive political topics came up. (“The walls have ears,” he would say.) Then he asked me not to repeat my friend’s comments about Mao to others in school.
“What’s so risky about the statement?” I argued. “The Party Central Committee has pretty much negated everything that Chairman Mao did.”
“You think you are college educated and know enough about life,” he said. “You have no idea of the severe political consequences of your irresponsible remarks. The Party still calls Mao a great leader, and who gives you the right to call him a dictator? Chairman Mao might have made many mistakes, but he is still revered by many. In our country, if you want to succeed, you’d better learn how to keep your mouth shut.” I despised what I saw as his “spineless” political view. “Times have changed. Only old stubborn people like you are still afraid and stay loyal to the Party.” I stopped short of using the phrase “old stubborn fools.” With that diatribe, I left. When I returned home that night, Mother pulled me aside and whispered that Father had sobbed after I had left. “You are like a baby bird who thinks the feathers on its wings are fully grown,” Mother lectured. “It’s sad that you look down on us like this.” I was remorseless and never apologized to Father.
What happened in the fall of 1983 proved Father’s wisdom. The Party tightened its control and launched an “anti–spiritual pollution campaign” to stem the spread of decadent Western liberal ideas, which they believed had undermined the supremacy of the Communist Party and led young people astray. Party leaders blamed the rising crime rates in China on the influence of bourgeois extreme individualism and Western imports such as pornography and Western hairstyles and clothing. As a result, books and lectures on Sartre and Nietzsche were banned. Many liberal-thinking writers and scholars were denounced. In Xi’an, I was told that many young people who organized private intimate dance parties and shared pornographic tapes with friends were sent to labor camps.
Father was relieved to hear that the campaign did not affect the overall student population at Fudan. I regretted my earlier outbursts at home, but I was too proud to tell Father that he was right. Fortunately the campaign was short-lived. Worrying that it could escalate into another Cultural Revolution, many moderates within the Party who had suffered tremendously in the Mao era petitioned senior leader Deng Xiaoping to limit its scope. In the summer of 1984, the Party’s efforts to eliminate spiritual pollution gradually fizzled out. By then, my own interest in existentialism had also faded. However, the concepts of freedom and choice had been ingrained in my mind. I felt that I had found a way to live for myself.
15.
WESTERNIZATION
I crouched in my seat in the back of a Boeing 707, clutching a plastic bag as the plane sputtered in the fog over London. I closed my eyes, trying to calm my stomach and my mind, which was filled with a mixture of excitement and fear. Two years into my undergraduate studies, I was headed to the United Kingdom to study and learn from the former foreign colonialist who, after China’s thirty-year isolation, were now our friends and models for modernization. We were to master the English language and apply our new skills to building a prosperous China. Back in the 1970s, my high school principal said foreign languages were weapons to fight our enemies; under Deng Xiaoping, our reformist leader, language became a tool to help us emulate them.
When I first heard Shakespeare in 1980, I thought “To be or not to be . . .” was from the Analects of Confucius. My early attempts to penetrate his work in Chinese were thwarted by the flowery, archaic language of the 1930s translation in the school library. Fortunately for me, a cinema in Xi’an was showing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet—the famous Chinese actor Sun Daolin dubbed Olivier’s dialogue—and I found a connection; it was like one of Father’s stories about the bloody power struggles of the Chinese imperial court. I didn’t realize foreigners also believed in ghosts. Shakespeare was poetry. When old Polonius advises “Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportion’d thought his act . . . / Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice: / Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.” I heard echoes of Father. With new understanding, I retrieved Hamlet from the library and read it so often that I could recite “I loved Ophelia. / Forty thousand brothers / Could not / with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum” to girls in my class.
Father couldn’t figure out how I could help modernize China by studying Shakespeare. “If an engineer studies abroad, he comes back and designs new machines that help peasants harvest more crops, but what can you do with Shakespeare?” I understood his reticence—in China, words, no matter how pretty, were the property of propaganda. However, in 1984, when few students were allowed to study abroad, having a liu xue sheng, or “student overseas,” was a tremendous honor for the family. Father was happy. His company sent him to Shanghai to spend a week with me before my departure.
The authorities tried to buffer us from the culture shock we were about to undergo with intensive political and cultural study sessions so we wouldn’t betray our motherland by defecting and embarrass China. It was hard to prepare anyone for their first encounter with a paper napkin or plastic knives and forks or unlimited supplies of Coca-Cola or the simple thrill of an airplane. I was twenty, doing things my parents could never dream of doing.
My first impression of Great Britain was that it was green; I had never seen so much lush grass, and I had trouble comprehending that its sole purpose was to be cut so it could grow again and please the eye. I grew up in the dust bowl of northwestern China and later lived in the polluted, densely packed city of Shanghai. In China, land not built on or being farmed was dirt. My knowledge of London was based almost entirely on the novels of the revolutionary realist writer Charles Dickens. I was expecting Oliver Twist, running around with a group of beggars on streets lined with smoke-spewing chimneys.
I remembered Father’s first trip to Shanghai and how awed he was by its tall buildings and neon lights, how he’d jokingly called it a decadent capitalist city. In comparison to London, Shanghai was an ugly duckling.
My mind was able to adjust to the conflict between perception and reality, but I was entirely unprepared for my first visit to a supermarket, Morrisons in Leeds. As a child, we had been repeatedly told that China was rich and that we should pity the poor oppressed masses of the West. Yet here, as my eyes scanned aisles and aisles of merchandise in rainbows of packaging, was so much food I nearly went into shock. Packages of uncooked chicken already cut into pieces, beef, lamb and mutton, pork, vegetables of root and leaf and stalk, drinks in cans and bottles and cartons. In the cookie aisle, I lost the ability to move. There were so many shapes and sizes and colors. I remembered a childhood story about how some Western tourists were taken to a restaurant in Beijing and treated to Peking duck and white wheat buns. In return for the kindness of the Chinese people, the grateful guests brought out some dry dark bread and presented it as a gift. Our leaders gracefully accepted the gift and then dumped it in the garbage. In the new China, people no longer ate poor people’s dark bread. We could afford big white buns, but we needed to save money and help the poor in the West. When I wrote to Father, I told him that people actually paid more for dark bread than white because it was better and healthier.
The early 1980s was a grim time for the UK. The British miners, under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, were on strike over mine closures. The yearlong miners’ strike
caused deep divisions among the students at my host university. Some students put up antigovernment posters and staged rallies in support of the miners. Others tore the posters down and rallied against the power of trade unions. On the kitchen wall of the flat I stayed in was a magazine portrait of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher surrounded by pictures of topless girls from page three of The Sun, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. I was mesmerized by a new TV show, Spitting Image, which used puppetry to satirize the British establishment, including the queen and the prime minister, and took shots at the hypocrisy of many world leaders. As a Chinese citizen, I had no experience with open displays of disrespect for leadership, but as the true sign of fluency in another language is to be able to laugh at the jokes of another culture, I relished this freedom. When my fellow students invited me to join rallies in support of the miners, I was nervous about participating in what were essentially demonstrations against the government and tried to stay on the sidelines, but when nothing happened to the students, I became more actively involved. Again, the freedom was exhilarating.
I had a hard time with my literature classes; since the development of critical thought was not encouraged in China, we learned to take notes and memorize whatever we were taught. In the UK, we met once a week with our tutor to discuss Shakespeare or the work of a contemporary writer. Then, we would go away and do some research and come back with an essay on the writer or a particular book. I struggled with the essays and left them until the last minute, writing through the night, drinking cups and cups of instant coffee and agonizing over my words. At the end of the semester, my overall score for English literature was only a B+. As if that were not humiliating enough, I failed miserably in my final English competency exam. Students were asked to write an essay about the impact of TV on young people. I did what I had been taught to do in China—I simply copied from memory an article that my teacher had used in our class. Impressed with my own amazing memory, I was expecting high scores. When the result came, I was stunned that I had scored an F, a first in my life. I was too ashamed to tell Father. Fortunately, he never inquired about my academic scores. Having heard stories about how some Chinese scholars or artists had defected to the West following their visits, Father was concerned that he might lose his eldest son to what the government called the “decadent world of capitalism,” especially after I began describing enthusiastically the wonderful things that I had seen in the UK. In fact, the thought of defecting never occurred to me. I wrote to him how hard it was for a Chinese student to find a job and survive in the UK, which was deep in a recession. Father remained unconvinced. Citing a popular Chinese saying, Father urged me not to betray the motherland: “A son never rejects his own mother simply because she is ugly and poor,” he wrote. “Besides, your Grandma misses you terribly.”
The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir Page 14
