Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  Everything about life here was different from the rugged Shitang. In my grandparents’ village, everyone lived in their own house – even the poorest fisherman had a small shed to call his own. But in Wenling, families lived together in compounds newly built by the government. No one was afforded an autonomous life here. Every adult belonged to a work unit, run by the state. During the day our parents worked in factories and offices. In Shitang, women were housewives, gossiping about their men on their doorsteps after lunch. But here, the women were full-time workers. Apart from the elderly, you never saw anyone just sitting in front of their house, contemplating the clouds, as was normal in Shitang. Everyone in Wenling seemed to be very proud of their work and dedicated to building a strong industry. My new surroundings seemed much nicer and more modern than my grandparents’ draughty stone house, yet I wasn’t sure if I was going to be happier here.

  The big news for me upon arriving in Wenling, however, was that I had a brother. He was two years older than me, and we hated each other immediately. The reasons for our enmity were many and complex. We had never lived together. He was nearly nine when I first met him. I noticed how his upper lip quivered and how he squinted at me through his glasses, as if I was an irritating pest. I was an invader, a threat to his material and emotional comfort. My brother had an instant prejudice against me and I was convinced that this attitude was encouraged by my mother, who had given me away to the goat-herding Wong family for adoption when I was born. The hierarchy in our family was obvious: my father was most important, then my brother, then my mother, and I was the insignificant flea unworthy of attention. At mealtimes my mother would save all the precious pork for my father and brother. If I reached for the meat, she would beat my chopsticks back and order me to wait until the men had finished eating. I was her last concern. Not only that, but I was also one of the youngest in the compound, and became an easy target for the boys. Warm Mountain turned out not to be so warm after all.

  My Mother

  The first conflict with my mother came about over language. Unlike my father, who spoke both the Shitang and Wenling dialects, my mother could only speak Wenling Hua. It must have been those roots, sharing a first language with my father, that turned me into my father’s child. Both my father and I were raised by my paternal grandparents; we had inherited the same traditions from the fishing village. So in the beginning, I didn’t want to talk to my mother and my brother, and my mother was disgusted by what came out of my mouth.

  ‘She speaks like your barbarian fishermen! She even behaves like them too!’ Then she grabbed my dirty shirt. ‘Look at her sleeves! Look at the layers of snot and dirt! She is one hundred per cent peasant!’

  My mother despised peasants. I couldn’t understand why. In my eyes, in Wenling, you were either a peasant or a worker. No one was richer or better than the other. Years later, I was told that it was the legacy of the Cultural Revolution that made my mother behave like this. Chairman Mao’s policy of sending city people to the countryside didn’t build respect between them; instead it alienated one from the other. The youth from the cities desperately wanted to go back home and the peasants felt disrespected.

  Later, I learned that my mother’s family had in fact been from real peasant stock. In the Chinese Household Registration system, fishermen and farmers belonged to the same caste, it was stamped in their documents: Peasant Household. And this status would determine what kind of job you could get and where you were allowed to live. When I grew a bit older and had learned to read and write, I found my mother’s ID card: Li Heying. Date of birth: 3 May 1949. Peasant Household. What a revelation! I was indignant. How could my mother despise me and treat me like a second-rate person?

  For generations, my mother’s family had worked with buffaloes in the rice paddies. But rarely were they blessed with a fat year. Since Wenling was in a mountainous region, peasants could only grow their crops on uneven patches of rocky hillside. Irrigation was difficult. You had to physically carry water buckets uphill in order to water the crops. Year in, year out, the weather worked against them. It was either drought or floods, and either way the crops were ruined. The family’s bad luck continued right up until the 1960s, when my mother’s generation were trained as factory workers to serve Mao’s ambitions: they were building China into an industrial nation that could compete with Western imperialism.

  That was how my mother, who only had three years of basic education and could just about write her own name on a registration form, escaped the farming life. She didn’t take up work in a factory, but instead joined the propaganda dance troupe attached to the association of local Red Guards, aged just fifteen. She was no great beauty – I’ve seen a photograph of her as a young girl – certainly not beautiful enough to be selected for the Red Guard’s propaganda team under normal circumstances. But she had the red and right background which suited their vision. She came from a straightforward peasant family and had a young innocent heart ripe for persuasion. So she was given an army uniform and an official armband, upon which was sewn the golden characters for ‘Red Guard’. Her plaits were cut short and she wore a green army hat with a red star on it, a brown leather belt tightly wrapped about her waist and a Little Red Book placed next to her heart, tucked into the left breast pocket of her uniform. She and the other teenagers were trained to chant lines from it, followed by cries of ‘Long live Chairman Mao, long live Chairman Mao, may Chairman Mao live for a million years!’

  Throughout the 1960s my mother and the other Red Guards went around the local theatres and performed in the streets, ‘educating the masses’. No one at that time was encouraged to get a higher education. ‘Ignorance is pride’, as one of the slogans from that period went. Of course, such was the revolutionary, peasant spirit. Perhaps my own rebellious spirit came from my mother, as little as I wanted to admit it considering how much I hated her during those years.

  It was impossible for me to get close to my mother – she was always nervous about something. She never asked me how I felt or what I wanted. She flew into a rage if I didn’t obey her, if I didn’t wash the vegetables properly, or if I broke a bowl by accident. It was as if she had been bitten by a rabid dog. I certainly didn’t want to be bitten in turn. She had a heart of stone, that’s how it felt to me. She was just like the uncompromising ideology of Maoist China – inhuman, unchallengeable and full of contradictions.

  Iron Plum and Red Lantern

  From the day I started school in Wenling aged eight I discovered how my mother spent her time. During the day my mother worked in the town’s silk factory and at night she and a selected group of workers rehearsed and performed revolutionary opera. By the end of 1970s, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution still reigned supreme. One of its manifestations was the continuation of the local performance groups and operas for the revolution, invented in the 1960s by Madame Mao. They combined a particular style of modern ballet with stories of the glorious Red Army. This mix created its own form of visual language for depicting heroes and villains. Normally the heroes would be the proletariat or Communist soldiers, the villains the landowners or Nationalist traitors. My mother’s silk factory was a major industrial base in Zhejiang Province. So it had its own opera and entertainment troupe. And on one occasion, fittingly, my mother was chosen for the leading role – Iron Plum from the famous opera Legend of the Red Lantern.

  It was a very big deal in our compound that my mother had been chosen to act in a revolutionary opera, even if it was just an amateur production. So almost every evening, after we had finished dinner, my brother and I would take our homework to the silk factory theatre where my mother was rehearsing with other worker-actors. I had always felt baffled by my mother’s former-Red Guard attitude towards life and how it conflicted with her peasant background. This opera only fuelled my confusion. It was set in the 1930s: the Nationalists controlled the country and the Communists were conducting underground activities in Japanese-occupied territories. One day the father of our heroine, Iron Plum
, is taken away and jailed by Nationalists soldiers. Iron Plum’s family now lives under the threat of police retaliation. She is told by her grandmother that her parents were working underground for the Communist Party and had sacrificed their lives for the revolutionary struggle. After hearing this heroic story, Iron Plum decides to follow their example and joins the revolution.

  My mother worked hard in rehearsals, so as not to disappoint the audience. The opera didn’t require much singing, but lots of physical movement and some very stiff poses, like spinning around a tree with a gun on her shoulder, singing. Each night, I would hear my mother complaining to my father about her exhaustion and lack of sleep. She would eat some leftovers in the kitchen, still be practising lines from the opera: ‘Now I finally understand my family’s mission. I will raise the red lantern to light the path of the future.’ She would speak doubtfully: ‘We still have to sing the praises of the revolution, despite no longer believing in such things.’ My father never said anything to contradict his wife. Before long they would both be asleep, after a hard day’s work, leaving me awake and confused on my small bed wondering about my mother’s comments.

  Since my mother was always occupied – either working in the factory or rehearsing for her opera – and my father was at his work unit all day long, I was expected to take care of most of the housework. My brother, the only son in the house, wouldn’t even touch the kitchen sink. I was around eight or nine – only a couple of years after I’d left Shitang – when I began cooking for the family, washing the clothes, mopping the floors and feeding the chickens after school. Perhaps it was natural for a daughter to take over the household duties from her mother? Nevertheless, I hated it. Why should I be the one to do everything? And what was the use of doing housework at all? Chairman Mao had slept in dirty shirts for almost half a century but that hadn’t hindered him from being the most powerful man in China. My grandmother had barely rinsed our bowls after each meal, because they would be just used again a few hours later for the same porridge. I resented being forced into such futile activities merely because I was the daughter.

  Most of all, I wanted to go out to play. I wanted to know what city kids did and what they talked about. But I didn’t seem to have the things the other kids had. My clothes were always roughly mended hand-me-downs from my brother. I didn’t have any friends. I was lonely. I wanted to be cared for and loved and I missed my grandmother. Especially after my father went to visit and came back to report that she had become very frail and she could no longer see much. I imagined my grandmother sitting in our stone house where my grandfather had committed suicide, with hardly any food and even less companionship. How did she endure the solitude? Did she still pray to Guanyin every day? Did she still weep in the dark kitchen? I constantly wondered how she was and I felt miserable, for her and for myself.

  My Father

  My father was the only one in the family I could connect to. He had a sensitive heart – partly because he was a painter and partly because he grew up by the sea, which imbued him with a fisherman’s spirit with which I was familiar. He was born in 1931, a significant year for China. Japan took advantage of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists to invade Manchuria. At the same time, Mao Zedong created his first Jiangxi Soviet Government in southern China with only two thousand men. In those days people desperately needed a great leader, and a revolution for the oppressed. He described to me the poverty of his childhood in Shitang: ‘Your grandmother, my mother, was sold to my father for a few kilos of yams. And I never owned a pair of shoes until I was thirteen.’ My father was supposed to become a sea scavenger like my grandfather. But he didn’t continue that family tradition. Instead, he wanted to paint, which surprised everyone.

  For some odd reason he didn’t really explain to me, he began to become obsessed with drawing and painting as a teenager. I was intrigued by this, as I still recalled my encounter with the art students on the beach. Had he had a similar experience? My father shook his head. He realised that Shitang offered him no possibility to pursue his artistic dream. So he left my grandparents at the age of sixteen and went to study at the province’s teacher-training college, where he received free accommodation and an education. The school was for proletarians, promoted by the Communist Party in the 1950s. There he was trained to paint and write calligraphy. They only used traditional Chinese ink, though in his free time he painted with any and every material he could find: squid ink, dye, chalk, crayon, watercolours, oil paints. Everyone said he was a better painter than his teachers, and that his calligraphy was superb. He was an excellent student. At nineteen he joined the Communist Party and began teaching. There was a big shortage of teachers at the time, so he was required to teach anything and everything, although he mostly concentrated on literature, painting, geography (even though he had never left our province) and physical education (he was good at basketball). In his spare time he wrote poems and published sketches. He was grateful to the party and to Mao for transforming him from an obscure fisherman’s son into an educated citizen. That was, until 1956, when he was caught up in the first nationwide political purge following the so-called Hundred Flowers Campaign. This was when his troubles began.

  The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a movement in which the Communist Party encouraged everyone to openly express their opinions about the regime. ‘The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science,’ Mao said at the time. Believing the party to be sincere, my father joined in wholeheartedly. He was keen to find solutions for the problems of the time, especially to improve the lot of the impoverished peasants who were forced to give away the entirety of their harvests to the army and the state. Since he was very good at drawing, he created a series of comics to show how the peasants were suffering and the negative consequences of the ‘collective farming’ policy, which he then published in local magazines. Lots of people saw them and agreed, and party members from the province paid attention to his opinions. But my father didn’t know that the government was also weeding out the ‘poisonous flowers’. Before a year had passed, Mao began a counter-campaign to rid the party of those who didn’t share his ideology or his solutions. More than half a million intellectuals, including my father, were targeted and condemned to labour camps. Overnight, my father, a ‘model teacher’ in a country school, was thrust into the storm of an ideological purge and fired from his job.

  ‘I was sent to Changshi, a mining region in our province, to do hard labour,’ he mentioned to me once.

  ‘What sort of labour?’ I asked eagerly, not understanding what he was really saying. I thought about the men in Shitang: they were either fishermen or labourers. Everybody worked with their hands. In fact, so far every adult man I had known was a labourer or a manual worker.

  ‘The sort of labour that one normally wouldn’t want to do. The work was dangerous, and physically very hard,’ he said, but he wouldn’t go into details. Maybe he didn’t want me to feel sorry for him, or he simply thought I wouldn’t understand. Some years later, my mother filled in what my father had left out. He had worked in a quarry, blasting away rocks with dynamite, then carrying stones down the valley for construction work. No one wore helmets and injuries were a daily occurrence. In the evenings, the men had to write page after page of self-criticisms, to purge themselves of their ‘capitalistic thoughts’. It had to be done with absolute sincerity – sarcasm, false notes or exaggerations would result in further denunciations and even more severe punishment.

  Class Enemies Getting Married

  My parents met in the 1960s, in one of the village recreation centres where my mother sang and danced with other Red Guards to ‘educate’ the peasants. This was the story my mother told me when I was a bit older.

  ‘We were class enemies,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, class enemies?’ I asked, finding the concept too abstract.

  ‘It means I was a Red Guar
d, and he was a Stinking Number Nine. I was obliged to beat and spit on him.’

  In contemporary Chinese culture, intellectuals were classified as number nine in a system of classes – lower than manual workers or doctors. During the Cultural Revolution, people resurrected the term, or else referred to them as ‘capitalist dogs’.

  ‘You mean you met Father while beating him up? And you spat on him?’ I couldn’t bring myself to believe this was true.

  ‘Yes. Exactly! I couldn’t see his face, as he was kneeling on a stage with a big placard with a black cross on it hanging around his neck.’

  ‘And it said Stinking Number Nine on it?’

  ‘Yes. We chanted slogans and sang revolutionary songs while they dragged class enemies onto the stage. They were forced to squat down as we read the charges out, things like “Anti-revolutionary Poisonous Weed” or “Bourgeois Poisonous Flower”, whatever was written on their placards. Some of them trembled and wept while we shouted at them. Then the head of the Red Guard team told us to teach them a lesson. I went straight to your father, spat on his head and kicked him in the spine. He didn’t fall over or make any noise. He remained on the floor, looking stubbornly up at me.’