The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  How could letters and family papers not belong to us? The Red Guards seized them: they would prove useful evidence in their investigation. Emboldened by this initial success, they turned to our bankbook—and confiscated it.

  “And what’s this?”

  One of the Guards held a small bottle in his hand. My mother had been saving this little bit of French perfume since she was a young woman, not touching it. The perfume was so old it had turned dark brown.

  “I asked you what it is!” the Guard repeated.

  My mother still didn’t answer. The Red Guard emptied out its contents. Then he threw the tiny bottle against the wall. It completely shattered, the pieces falling to the floor, leaving behind an elegant scent.

  “Do you have any books?”

  “No, we don’t have any.” As a precaution, we had gotten rid of them, with the exception of my childhood Piano Music Masterpieces, which my mother had hidden in the piano bench. One of the Red Guards turned to my sister Xiaoyen:

  “You, go prepare some glue! You’ll need it to put this up,” he said, brandishing a Dazibao they had brought with them. “This is about your worthless father!”

  My mother was overwhelmed and fainted. Before leaving, the Guards bellowed at us:

  “We’ll be back tomorrow. This Dazibao must be posted on the wall of your building!”

  That evening, my sisters and I went out and put up the defamatory poster denouncing our father. As we returned, we found our neighbors, the Guans, talking with my mother and grandmother. They were simple folk who worked as laborers in a shoe factory. They had observed the Red Guards’ visit but had discreetly waited until nightfall before coming to see us.

  “It is impossible that Mr. Zhu is a spy,” they told my mother. They then turned to the rest of us, incredulous: “Your father is a good man. How could anyone accuse him of such things?”

  The conversation continued into the night. After they left, I sensed how much their visit had helped my mother. From then on, the Guans stopped by each day to see her, to offer a few words and smiles that kept her from despair. Without them, I now know, it is entirely possible that my mother could have ended up like Mama Zheng.

  The following morning began shamefully for us. From our window, throughout the day, we saw little groups gather in front of our siheyuan to read the Dazibao we had pasted up. People glanced at our windows; sometimes they would point at them and then move on. We didn’t dare go out. In the middle of the afternoon, when my sisters and I were deep in discussion about how we could get rid of the Dazibao, there was once again noise outside the apartment. The Red Guards were back. This time they wanted to speak to my grandmother:

  “You, what is your background?”

  “Bourgeois,” she replied calmly.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Shanghai.”

  “You must go back there. Chushen bu hao are not permitted to stay in Beijing. They are a danger to Chairman Mao. We don’t want to see you here tomorrow morning!”

  I tried to intervene, using every possible argument: I explained that we had no money for a train ticket since the Red Guards had confiscated our bankbook.

  “You’re on your own! We’ll be back tomorrow. She’d better not be here.”

  After the door closed, we sat for a long time in silence. Then my grandmother spoke:

  “The best thing is for me to leave. I will return to Shanghai, and I’ll come back later on. If not, tomorrow will be a terrible day. Xiao-Mei, Xiaoyin, try to find me a train ticket.”

  A ticket for Shanghai cost twelve yuan. I spent most of the evening on my bicycle with Xiaoyin, going from friend to friend, trying to borrow enough to pay for it. Finally, the student from the Conservatory who had written to Mao about me loaned me the money, on one condition:

  “You must trust in Mao. We are too young to know if your grandmother or your family are guilty, but he knows.”

  I got back around midnight; my father was there. He had been released that evening. Unable to speak, he uttered only a few words:

  “There is nothing to be done.”

  The next morning when I awoke, I saw that my grandmother had carefully done her hair and had put on her best clothes. She caught my astonished gaze. For three months, like a good revolutionary, I had hardly washed, I wore an old jacket and pair of pants, and I used bad language that, most of the time, I didn’t understand.

  “You know, Xiao-Mei,” my grandmother began with a little smile, “even if people don’t respect me, I have self-respect.” Then she added, “Don’t worry about me. Look, they didn’t beat me or forbid me to travel. I’m fortunate. I know a lot of people in Shanghai. I won’t be alone. It will be easy for me. Rest assured, we’ll see each other again.”

  I accompanied her to the train station. Her strength of character was impressive. Next to her, I felt weak, unable to protect her. When we were on the platform, she smiled at me:

  “I’ve lived well. I’ve had a good life. It’s really you that I’m worried about.”

  Then she climbed aboard the packed train. In China, people don’t embrace one another, and even in life’s most painful moments, one tries not to show any emotion. We simply said good-bye. The train pulled out of the station, and I watched it disappear into the distance.

  Back at the house, I noticed that the Dazibao had disappeared. In our apartment, I found the Guans talking with my mother. They had devised a scheme to get rid of the poster, and had kept it a surprise. A six-year-old boy, whom they knew well, went and tore it down, as simple as that. Because of his age, no one could hold it against him. Plus, if he were hauled in, we didn’t know him, and no one would put two and two together. The next day, my mother was already feeling calmer.

  In Beijing, violence reigned. The Red Guards attacked anyone who represented the old order, even remotely. The least little former shopkeeper was labeled a “capitalist blood-sucker.” Whole families were sent back to where they had come from. Others were forced to wear signs around their necks stating that they had bad family backgrounds. Still others had half their heads shaved, as a mark of shame. Some women were beaten, not by the Red Guards, but by their own sons, who were forced to comply. But the worst was yet to come.4

  I had barely arrived at the Conservatory at the start of the school year in September 1966 when we received an order from the Red Guards:

  “Bring your records and musical scores. Everything you have left.”

  One of my classmates asked what they were going to do with them.

  “They’re going to be burned.”

  I suddenly remembered that I had left some things in the Conservatory’s annex, a print shop that had been converted into classrooms. I hastened to get them, but as I crossed the threshold, I ran into Dapeng, my trombonist friend. He stopped me:

  “What are you doing? Don’t you know what’s going on? Over the last week, dead bodies have been brought here.”

  At that exact moment, the stench hit me. It was so strong, I felt ill. I turned to him, completely speechless.

  “If you don’t believe me, go see for yourself,” he said.

  I stood there, frozen with fear.

  Dapeng explained to me that the practice rooms were full of corpses. Since the crematorium only functioned on Tuesdays, and due to the large number of dead people in Beijing, the Red Guards had turned the Conservatory’s annex into a vast morgue.

  “There are even people in there who aren’t yet dead, who are still suffering,” he added. “The Red Guards forced others to wear their fur coats before shooting them. That’s why it smells so terribly.”

  This was more than I could stand. I fled.

  Everything was burning. Today it was the bodies; tomorrow it would be the spirit.

  I imagined the bonfire where the Red Guards were melting down our records and burning our scores…a thin veil of smoke lifted towards the sky. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven vanished into the air.

  But in the end, the Red Guards were right: it had to be d
one. As Mao said: “The Revolution is not a dinner party. It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

  8

  A Revolutionary

  We must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and we must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out.

  (Lin Biao)

  Confusion. Emptiness. Oblivion. At the end of 1966, courses at the “Conservatory without music” were replaced with political action. Exhaustive study of The Little Red Book, discussions between various student factions: everyone wanted to show that he or she was better at interpreting Mao’s thought than anyone else. A disquieting sort of order reigned: on the one hand, the school was tidier than ever before, thanks to our professors, who were now cleaning people. On the other hand, any sort of education had been utterly abandoned; there was no more homework, no more books, no other goal but to tear down the old order.

  The regime chose this moment to set in motion the Da Chuanlian movement, which means “mass exchange.” The idea was to spread the Cultural Revolution across the entire country through inter-city and inter-university exchanges between Red Guards and students. The best candidates from the Conservatory were asked to take an active role. Because of my background, I was not among them, but during the autumn of 1966, I was allowed to go to Beida University, where the Cultural Revolution had begun. I took it as a harbinger of a possible rehabilitation: it was still possible for me to become a real revolutionary.

  Studying the thought of Mao Zedong was now mandatory for the entire population, for both the young and the old. When you wanted to board a bus, the Red Guards would step up and ask you, “In The Little Red Book, where does this passage come from? Or this one?” If you couldn’t answer, you weren’t allowed to get on the bus. It was no surprise that elderly people, whose memories were poorer, were ruthlessly pushed aside by the Guards.

  Scenes of public confessions multiplied. Even today, I am haunted by images from one session I witnessed. It took place in a stadium in Beijing, before eight thousand people. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old man who had dared to put forward the idea that you could be a good revolutionary even if your parents weren’t. He considered himself to be one, even though he came from a bad family background. Despite our revolutionary convictions, I had difficulty repressing my bourgeois instinct, which caused me to admire the courage of this young man who had not denounced his parents. Over the course of an hour, he held up under the blows and humiliations to which he was subjected. When the session was over, they hauled him through the city on public display. Then he was executed. “Reactionary father, bastard son” was a popular slogan.

  Early in 1967, I finally received permission to leave Beijing and participate in “mass exchange” visits to the countryside. I was warned that these trips were serious business, and that I wasn’t to use them to visit family. I was accompanied by a comrade, because I wasn’t yet allowed to travel by myself. Nevertheless, I took it as an encouraging sign.

  My first trip was to Shanghai. But besides this official business in my native city, I had something to look into, a mystery to solve. Was there any truth to the claim that my father was a spy, or not? Had he really been in the pay of imperialists? If the Red Guards were right, would I have the courage to denounce him? If I did, I would feel less torn between my revolutionary faith and my attachment to my family—less crushed by the weight of my bad background. Forty years later, I see myself as I was that year—how I had been shaped to be: a brainless being fashioned for a single purpose—to be just like everyone else.

  In Shanghai, political meetings were supposed to keep me fully occupied, but that wasn’t the case. I had a great deal of time on my hands, which fit my plans perfectly.

  I couldn’t help myself. Contrary to what I had been told, I had to go see my grandmother. She was living on a squalid street on the edge of town. The inhabitants had turned it into a narrow lane by erecting all kinds of structures on either side: kitchens, garages, anything to increase the size of their living spaces. My grandmother lived in a 160-square-foot former kitchen, without electricity, furnished only with a bed, a table, and a slop pail in the corner.

  “Xiao-Mei? What are you doing here? What’s happened?”

  She spoke softly with a weak voice and coughed incessantly. I gazed at her, so small and frail; she looked like a flickering candle. I explained why I was in Shanghai. I also told her about my resolve: to become a good revolutionary. This time I had a good chance of succeeding, but for it to work, my behavior had to be exemplary. My grandmother asked me for news of our family. I glimpsed our family photographs in the corner of her room.

  “I look at them,” she said, “and I read the letters your mother sends me, over and over.”

  I realized that I had come without a gift; I could have brought her favorite brioches from the Chenghuang Miao temple district in Shanghai, and I suddenly felt guilty. As I prepared to leave, I could read the disappointment on her face. My grandmother, who had said she knew all sorts of people in Shanghai, was clearly very alone. To fraternize with someone who had fallen out of favor with the regime was dangerous for one’s friends.

  She insisted that I stay.

  “I can’t, I am not allowed to. I’m afraid they’ll find me here.”

  “Then try and come back before you leave. How long will you be here? Come and have lunch with me. I can’t cook, but I can ask the neighbors to prepare bamboo shoots with tofu.”

  She knew it was my favorite dish. But I wasn’t going to return. Out of fear and revolutionary commitment. Besides, I had important research to do.

  To start, I paid a visit to my father’s older sister:

  “You know, Xiao-Mei, your father is a good man. For years, without your mother knowing it, he sent us money. Without him, we wouldn’t have had enough to eat.”

  She wasn’t about to tell me the truth about my father’s activities as a spy.

  Next I went to see the place where I was born. I looked at the bourgeois building, Fuxing Park, the wide avenue—how could I not feel guilty?

  I questioned old friends of my father. They couldn’t even understand my questions:

  “Don’t you understand? Your father is honesty itself! He was never a spy!”

  But one of them took care to add:

  “If you don’t understand what the Party has against your father, trust in the Party. You’ll understand later.”

  This was a paraphrase of something we heard incessantly repeated: “We must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and we must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out.”

  I returned to Beijing both satisfied and frustrated. Satisfied because I had passed my first test of being a good revolutionary, but frustrated because I hadn’t uncovered the truth about my father. I would have to continue living with uncertainty.

  In the meantime, my mother had received a letter from my grandmother.

  “You know, she was so sad that you didn’t go back and see her again,” was all my mother said.

  The image of my grandmother belonged to the world of my childhood. I needed to look forward, to the shining future of Communist China.

  After Shanghai, I was given the chance to go on a pilgrimage that was dear to every Chinese person’s heart: a trip to Shaoshan, Mao Zedong’s birthplace. Two thousand one hundred miles in packed trains—but a great joy. I had never even seen Mao, but he had finally allowed me to get closer to him, to gather strength from his path.

  Shaoshan is a mountain village of a few hundred inhabitants, some thirty miles from the main town of the district. Mao’s birthplace, with its gray-tiled roof, was much larger and more beautiful than those of its neighbors. Starting in 1949, it had been transformed into a sort of shrine. We had to stand in line for a good two hours before being allowed in. I also visited the little village school where Chairman Mao studied. I was mos
t moved, however, by his bedroom. How had this man risen to become the country’s leader? Someone from a humble background, living in a tiny village in the farthest reaches of China, who never went to university. How could one not admire his intelligence, his courage, and his willpower? I wandered around the village for hours, turning these questions over in my mind. By the end of the day, the purpose of the trip had been achieved. My devotion was close to elation.

  Upon returning to Beijing, I was allowed to go on a new trip, this time to Chengdu in Sichuan Province. I was told that the situation there was particularly serious. There were violent clashes between different student factions, and every day brought a new death toll. Before leaving, I wrote a note to my parents:

  I am leaving for Chengdu where the Revolution is in danger. If I should die, you must not be sad. I will have given my life for Mao. What I am undertaking is the most meaningful thing that I could do in life.

  Xiao-Mei

  A few months before, the regime had decided to make train travel free in order to facilitate the mass exchange of the Da Chuanlian. The train I got on was so overcrowded that I had to travel in the toilets most of the way.

  The next day, when we arrived in Chengdu, I headed for the university, to the office that was responsible for orienting visitors.

  “We have come from Beijing.”

  The woman who greeted us was impressed; she imagined that Mao himself had sent us! This was obviously naive of her, but I was secretly pleased. At last, I was free from people’s criticism; I was admired and respected. This was simplistic on my part, of course.

  She filled us in on the situation:

  “It’s total chaos. The university is divided into two main groups, within which there are also factions. On one side there is the ‘Movement of August 26,’ and on the other side there is the ‘Red Chengdu Movement.’ Be careful; there have been many deaths. The students have guns.”

  In the days that followed, I listened carefully to the arguments of the various factions. We had to figure out which side to support. Who upheld the Revolution better? Today, forty years on, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, nor could I describe why the factions were on opposing sides. But at the time, my mind was made up: I sided with the Medical School.