Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  ‘One day, in 1843, Hong Xiuquan claimed that he had seen Jesus Christ in a revelation and he came to realise that he was the Chinese son of God, and the younger brother of Jesus.’

  ‘How many sons does God have?’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘That depends on which fairy tale you refer to. As atheists, we don’t believe in God and Jesus and all that.’ The teacher sounded almost annoyed by my ignorance.

  ‘Maybe that’s why Hong Xiuquan didn’t inspire people enough to succeed against the Qing emperor, because no one believed in him in China,’ I concluded, most pleased with myself.

  ‘Maybe you’re right, but he wasn’t even recognised in the West. No Western missionary took him seriously. They didn’t believe he had anything to do with Jesus,’ the teacher explained. Then the tone turned more emotional.

  ‘In my opinion, it was just white people’s prejudice against us yellow people. Why can’t Jesus have a yellow brother? What’s wrong with that?’

  We listened quietly in our seats, slightly confused. The teacher had just told us that there was no Jesus or God. So why was he arguing that Jesus might have had a yellow brother? If Jesus could have had a Chinese brother, did that mean God really existed after all? I did the calculation in my head: if Jesus was born two thousand years ago, how could his Chinese brother be born 1,800 years later? It didn’t make sense. We are the children of Communists, I told myself once and for all. We don’t believe in these religious stories.

  It was also because of world-history class that I fell in love with the idealised image of the Yugoslav leader Tito. True, he looked very stern in all the photos, even a little bit scary, but I supposed this was a manifestation of his upright Communist faith. Tito was one of the few foreign figures that the Chinese government decided to promote. Perhaps because he had been keen on the idea of the Non-Aligned Movement against Soviet power, given that the Chinese government hadn’t been too happy with Stalin’s dominance in the past. In fact, the split between the Chinese Communist Party and Soviets realigned our education more towards the rest of Eastern Europe, with literature and cinema from Poland, Czechoslovakia, as well as the People’s Republic of Albania. Tito was our first Western hero, before we discovered Che Guevara and Jim Morrison. The year I turned ten, I was selected to become one of the new Young Pioneers. I assumed my position underneath the red flag of China, alongside a dozen or so other students, as was compulsory in a 1980s Chinese primary school. I raised my right fist and vowed allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, promising to be a diligent student and a useful citizen, and that I would dedicate my life to the state. After my vow, our headmaster tied a brand-new red kerchief around my neck. I was told to always keep it clean and neatly tied. From that day on, I had officially become a future candidate for Communist Party Membership, a proud shaoxian duiyuan.

  Life as a Propaganda Painter

  My father had spent years in labour camps before I was born, and yet my brother and I never really learned how things had been for him during those long years. We had the feeling that looking into his past was like looking through the thick lenses he wore every day – they glittered but also distorted as much as they revealed. We knew he had worked in mines, built roads and toiled in paddy fields. The Cultural Revolution had done its best to teach him a lesson: peasant values were more important than intellectual ones. But they hadn’t understood that my father had always respected physical labour and regarded art as work of the hands.

  After Mao died in 1976, the new government began to reform. My father and many others who had been sentenced to hard labour were rehabilitated. The government acknowledged that my father had been a victim of misconduct and the frantic power struggle that spurred on the Cultural Revolution. ‘An innocent man and a good comrade’ – that was his new label. From the 1980s onwards, people began to respect him as a talented painter and calligrapher. Shortly after I arrived in Wenling to live with my family, he was promoted to head of the Collective Painters’ Team in the Wenling Cultural Bureau. He was given a brand-new studio and a modest monthly salary as a state painter to work on propaganda paintings, although technically he could paint whatever he wanted as well. He remained a landscape painter in the old style, rejecting all colour. There were three types of ink in traditional Chinese painting: dry, wet and green. The green ink was combined with a greenish-blue extract found naturally in some types of stone. My father even produced his own ink by collecting rocks in the surrounding mountains and fields, and then grinding them down with a pestle and mortar. I always thought it looked like a lot of work. Towards the end of the 1980s new fashions began to emerge in Chinese ink painting and my father, too, began to experiment. He mixed green, pink and white Western watercolours. They looked especially transparent on Chinese rice paper, illuminating a subject like the moon beautifully. With his rehabilitation, he was also free to pursue his long-time fascination with French Impressionism – landscapes without peasants or workers. That was my father’s way of rejecting the ‘social realist’ style.

  I saw the essential contradiction that troubled my father: in his mind he was a Marxist and believed only Communism would bring prosperity to the people, but in his heart he didn’t like using such ideology in his work. Even in his calligraphy and poetry writing, he chose the sensual and apolitical ‘obscure’ style, itself a rejection of the ‘revolutionary poetry’ which had been developed during the Cultural Revolution and which still dominated the literary landscape of the 1980s. But as a state artist, he was required to make a certain number of state-assigned propaganda posters and wall paintings every year. These would be used in festivals such as May First Labour Day, Women’s Day, Army Day, the October National Holiday. His paintings were even used in service to the One Child Policy. I remember watching him using a selection of Chinese and Western brushes to paint a ‘positive’ portrait of a happy family flourishing under state-enforced family planning: a chubby laughing baby sat in the arms of his parents under a willow tree by a fishpond. He mainly painted in ink, with only a slight hint of red for the child’s clothes. Even the goldfish in the pond were black. Another time, he worked on a large portrait in what we called the ‘army and people togetherness’ style: soldiers and peasants playing basketball after the harvest. He stayed in his studio for weeks, sleeping there at night.

  One day, when I brought him his lunch box, he said to me, ‘Chinese ink isn’t designed to paint so many intricate little figures …’ I didn’t fully understand what he meant, but I got the sense that he disliked the mishmash of realistic subject matter in traditional inks. Like using Zen Buddhism to analyse the market economy. Certainly, a misuse and abuse of tools! It was unfortunate that social realism had been the only acceptable style in painting, writing, film-making and theatre for so long. By the 1980s things started to relax somehow, but as a state artist my father had serious work to do for the Communist Party, which meant suppressing his own preference for ethereal landscapes devoid of the proletariat.

  There was in fact a shift of focus in the propaganda paintings of the 1980s. In the past, they had mainly depicted Mao and his heroic deeds on behalf of the people. But in the Deng Xiaoping era, the authorities were keen to show a clear break from the Maoist period and so no longer focused on making portraits of our leaders. Most of my father’s assignments were to paint peasants, low-ranking soldiers and workers, to sing the praises of the ordinary Chinese. But painting a propaganda poster was never an easy task. In those days, there was no fashion for postmodernism. Indeed, to use such a style would leave yourself open to accusations of both moral and political incorrectness. My father had always been scared of having to paint Mao during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, for fear of prosecution on the ground of misrepresenting the Great Leader. Besides, my father had never studied human anatomy. He never felt comfortable with the human form as his subject matter. After all, he painted mountains and seas and drifting clouds. The worship of Mao killed many a painter’s imagination.

  ‘It’s so wro
ng that the state classifies painters as intellectuals, rather than physical workers,’ my father said to me once, standing before one of his large propaganda pieces. It had taken him at least four weeks of work, day and night, to do a four-square-metre poster, and that was just to get the faces of the leaders looking perfect. ‘Each hair had to be just right, or I’d get in trouble,’ he told me. ‘But the worst part was painting Mao’s mole.’ Everyone knew the Great Leader had a large, unsightly mole on the left side of his chin, just below the corner of his lower lip. Exactly how this was depicted, without overstating or understating it, was a serious issue.

  My brother Dapeng followed my father and studied Chinese ink painting throughout his teenage years. He enrolled at an art school in the province’s capital, Hangzhou. He then moved from Hangzhou to Beijing to continue his studies. It seemed as a family we had swapped fishing for painting. My brother was also drawn to abstract, poetic subjects, under the influence of my father. But he turned out to be more progressive, and received proper training in human anatomy and Western geometrical perspective. He knew about ‘vanishing points’ and ‘foreshortening’. Therefore he could paint figures very well. I remember he had piles of art books by his bedside – mostly about Leonardo da Vinci. I once saw my father leafing through them when my brother wasn’t there. He studied the images for a long time, raising his eyes every now and again, as if lost in thought. Then he sighed, put the book down and walked slowly back to his studio.

  The Blood Eater

  Although I was slowly absorbing by a kind of osmosis the lessons of my father’s painting studio, life in Wenling was nevertheless centred around one thing: filling my hungry stomach with food. The food was better than in the fishing village, but I was still starving most of the time, and extremely thin. I weighed only three stone four pounds as I turned nine years old, while the other children my age weighed four stone ten pounds. I also had very low blood pressure, so that each time I stood up from a sitting position I felt dizzy and often blacked out. I desperately needed iron, but meat was rarely available in our house. On top of all this, I had tapeworms growing in my belly. I was constantly swallowing pills in a war against the parasites, but they always returned. I needed nutrition. But our monthly quota wasn’t enough. At that time, every household was still given liang piao (food tickets) distributed by the state annually. Under the quota system, we were allowed to buy a small portion of meat each month, usually pork. But even before it had touched the dining table, my brother alone would have devoured the whole portion. I was as hungry as him, but he was a boy so my mother gave him more. My constant hunger became an obsession, finding food was a compulsion.

  Like most of my fellow countrymen, I ate anything I could find or catch: I trapped birds, caught toads, ran after wild chickens, and gnawed on the hard roots of the sugar-cane plant. Catching birds I did alone. I found a rusty birdcage at the back of our compound and hid it behind the communal toilets. Normally I placed a small bowl with grain inside the cage and took it out into the fields. Then I would tie a long string on the cage door and, holding the other end, went behind a tree or some bushes. Once a bird flew inside, I tugged the door shut. In all those long hours of waiting, I succeeded only once, and when I got home with the dead bird in my pocket, my mother shouted and even smacked me for being late. Which meant I didn’t get a chance to eat it until the next day, when my parents were at work. The birdcage method was useless, so I continued to experiment. I carried a bucket up into the hills behind our house, where I filled it with water. Seeking out a clump of bushes sure to be home to a flock of birds, I crouched in the undergrowth and waited, my eyes bulging, for a chance to strike. A bird fluttered close; I jumped up and doused it with water. This weighed down the wings and I could grab it before it could fly away. Bird in hand, I wasted no time: I grabbed a rock and smashed its head. Then it was back down the mountain, straight inside, no time to gut it, it was in a wok with leftover rice. I had to spit out the feathers as I ate rapidly. My brother couldn’t be allowed to catch me.

  But I was still ravenous. Sometimes I was so hungry by bedtime that I couldn’t sleep. I needed other sources of sustenance. When it rained, I would be up the next morning to climb the hills in search of newly sprouted bamboo roots. I dug out the whole plant and took them home to share with my family, because they too loved eating young bamboo. It was all I could do to find enough vitamins, but with so little iron, I was struggling to grow.

  Then I discovered pig’s blood.

  One afternoon, I overheard that our next-door neighbour was having a miscarriage. She was pale and thin, and worked at the same silk factory as my mother. It was a sweaty summer morning, and I had been listening to her cries and screams for nearly half an hour. Eventually I went next door. A crowd of women blocked the door, but I squeezed past in order to find out what a miscarriage was. All I saw were trails of blood on the floor, then a pool collected on the bedroom floor. The woman was half crawling in her blood-soaked clothes, her mother and grandmother on either side, trying to get her to stand. Her husband was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he had been dispatched by the work unit, just as my father was often sent to other towns. That month my father wasn’t around either.

  Then I heard my mother’s voice: ‘They slaughtered two pigs this morning in the factory. Should I run to the canteen now?’

  Another woman’s voice, much more urgent than my mother’s: ‘Take the bucket! Two buckets!’

  Still hiding, I saw my mother and another woman run towards the factory canteen, buckets in their hands. Half an hour later, my mother and the other woman returned, out of breath but carrying two buckets of pig’s blood. ‘It’s still warm!’ someone cried.

  The mother of the young woman brought a rice bowl from the kitchen and poured some of the pig’s blood into it. Then she handed the bowl to her daughter and ordered her to drink.

  Another voice spoke up: ‘Auntie, can I use some of your ginger? We’ll make some blood soup. Let’s add some gouchi seeds and meat too, if you have it.’

  All of a sudden, women were running in and out of the front door, ferrying special herbs and vegetables from their own kitchens as the hens and roosters that were scuttling around the yard were shooed away. In all the excitement I managed to make my way into the woman’s bedroom.

  Her lips were red with blood, her eyes terrified.

  ‘Look at the veins in your wrist!’ her mother cried. ‘You can see them expanding!’

  I crept closer and looked for myself. Her veins seemed to be darkening and thickening. Was the pig’s blood making her veins thicker and stronger?

  ‘Now your blood has fortified with iron, you’ll be fine,’ an elderly woman near me added.

  This was the first time I had heard of such a method for fortifying the blood. Still a bit scared, I watched the activity going on around me. That day, the kitchen was busy with women making all sorts of food containing pig’s blood. First, blood soup with shredded meat and ginger. Then the women used coagulated blood to make blood tofu. At the same time, several other women were making blood sausage and mixing it with sticky rice. All the kids were hungry in those years. But we were told not to touch any of the food until the miscarrying woman had eaten her fill and felt better. So we children went out to play by the local pond up in the bamboo hills. But from then on, I started demanding pig’s blood sausage, or blood soup. My parents often managed to secure free supplies from the silk factory canteen. After about a year or two, I noticed that I didn’t faint as often as I used to in the past, and my face wasn’t quite so yellow and sickly as before. I was raised on the blood of pigs, the luckiest and laziest members of every Chinese peasant household. Perhaps I had been half pig all along.

  The Four Modernisations

  My stomach satisfied, I could begin to focus on my studies. My memories of primary school are played to the accompaniment of political slogans. I must have been shouting them in my dreams, since they were drilled into us by every radio and television programme, phra
se by phrase, day in, day out.

  Once a child started school in China during the 1970s and 80s, he or she would be instructed to love and learn from a national hero by the name of Lei Feng. Lei Feng had been a young soldier serving in the People’s Liberation Army in the early 1960s. He had died when he was twenty-two, we were told. For years he had been the ultimate poster boy for the revolution, always wearing his army uniform and a big smile, a rifle in one hand. Follow Lei Feng’s example; love the party, love socialism, love the people. We learned how selfless Lei Feng had been, how he had dedicated every single minute of his life to the greater good. That was the ideal; to be entirely selfless, without vanity, and not to daydream. Lei Feng was a great, if not the greatest, example to all children. Of course we took the teacher’s words to heart and tried to be as good as Lei Feng. Because at that time we had never heard of Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, or even Disney. We had no other alternatives.

  Lei Feng’s Diary was first presented to the public by the then vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Lin Biao, in the ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ propaganda campaigns of 1963. The diary was full of accounts of Lei’s admiration for Mao Zedong, his self-sacrificing deeds, and his desire to foment the revolutionary spirit in others. He described sneaking into the house of an old grandmother and doing all her housework, even buying rice for her, then leaving like an invisible man. The ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ campaign lasted until the mid-1990s. I still remember a People’s Daily editorial published in 1993, the year I left for Beijing, which said: ‘When Lei Feng died in the line of duty, he was only 22, but his short life gives concentrated expression to the noble ideals of a new people, nurtured by the communist spirit, and also to the noble moral integrity and values of the Chinese people in the new China.’ I remember liking that expression ‘a new people’, even though I didn’t want to be one of them myself. I wanted to be ‘new’ in the sense of free from both Chinese tradition and Communist dogma. I wanted to be a new woman unburdened from domestic housework, as well as the obligation to read lengthy textbooks on ‘Mao’s Revolutionary Thoughts’. We had to memorise the government slogans, which was stressful. I remember sitting a political studies examination at the age of twelve. We were given an exam paper with twenty questions printed on it. I read the first one: