People who have been brought up in a democracy don’t know, they can’t imagine, what it was like. In the whole country there was a rule for everything; everything was regulated. In school, students were allowed to learn only one foreign language: Russian. No matter where a school was located, as long as it was on the map of China, and no matter whether it was an elementary school, high school or college, a book could only be taught in one way.
During the Great Cultural revolution, there were only eight model plays for the whole country’s seven hundred million people to watch. Any other play was judged to be feudal, bourgeois, revisionist—something to be destroyed, abandoned, eradicated, overthrown. How about books? The situation was even worse, there were only Mao’s works, which were called the “red treasure.”
For us, the generation born after 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power, the generation “born under the red flag, and brought up under the red flag,” we knew nothing about what life was like before. In the whole country there was only one voice to be heard. All the media were controlled by the CCP. Whatever the media said, we took for granted that it was true.
We thought our situation was normal, that every country was the same, and that every government was the same. We did not miss hearing different voices because we did not know they could exist.
We were just like what Mao once described: pure like blank paper, easy to paint a new and beautiful picture on. Yes, we were smeared by the CCP with whatever they wanted to put on us. All around us were lies, but we didn’t know. No one dared to tell the truth, just as in the story about the emperor’s new clothes.
When as teenagers we watched the movie of “The Red Detachment of Women” in 1964 in Tianjin City, we were so deeply impressed. We thought the story was all true. Because we did not tell lies, we did not think others did. Now we know there was never a person, not in the past or now, like the “tyrant of the south,” Nan Ba Tian. And there was never a victimized peasant girl like the heroine Wu Qinghua. It was a total lie. But the play had an effect, as the CCP had hoped it would.
When we watched the play, we had a deep feeling in our hearts that all landlords were evil, hateful, unforgiveable. They should be hacked to pieces. The only way to deal with them was to kill them, no matter how it was done.
If a person was only said to be a landlord, then it was the same as sentencing him or her to death. The hatred immediately came up in our hearts. And a landlord was not a single person, the landlords were a class, and so this was a serious class fight.
Killing Life
I thought I had forgotten and had left these memories in the past. But today they unfold before me scene by scene like a movie. They have not faded at all with time’s passage.
One day, everyone was good and kind enough, but then just the next day, everything changed.
One of our teachers, a gentle, old man with grey hair, in his sixties I guess, was held by his students in a small room. One of my classmates was a secretary of the Communist Youth League and belonged to one of the Five Red Categories (people were sorted out into different classes according to their family background. The Five Red Categories included such types as revolutionary cadres and poor peasants. The Five Black Categories included landlords, capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and so on.).
She threw the old man down, denounced him, and beat him in front of all of us. She interrogated him and forced him to admit his “counterrevolutionary acts.” She called him by the name “Lang Laojian” or “Old Scoundrel Lang.” The students thought he was from a family that was not good.
So many teachers had taken such care for their students, but then the students they had loved so much turned them into prisoners. Their beloved students whipped them, tortured them, and insulted them in so many ways.
Some of the teachers had a brick hung around their necks. Some of the younger female teachers had their heads forcibly shaved into the Yin and Yang style—half the head was bald and half left with hair. The teachers were made to feel so shamed by this that they felt they would rather die. Many were beaten to death and some committed suicide.
Those of us who were not in the Five Red Categories were on the edge; we just wanted to be considered revolutionaries.
One day in the middle of the summer in 1966—I forget whether it was hot or not, I could not think of that at that time—we got a notice from the Red Guards. If we wanted to stand on the right side, we should go to attend their rally. They would criticize and struggle with those counter revolutionaries—the landlords, capitalists, and scholars.
It was at the small square of the North Train station in Tianjin. Hundreds of people circled around a middle-aged woman. Her neighborhood committee had said that she had been a landlord before 1949. So the Red Guards raided her home and brought her to the square.
They forced her to kneel down on a narrow bench, but the bench was so narrow that she could not stay on it. She fell down off the bench, and then over and over they forced her to kneel on it again. Later someone grabbed her youngest son and put him there to be criticized together with her.
The child sat on the ground and silently cried. Someone whispered that he was only seven years old. One of the red guards whipped the mother with a belt, and another tried to force the boy to beat his mom, to show he would draw a line between him and his mom. The boy did not make a move. He only sat there silently on the ground with the tears rolling down his cheeks.
Continued on the next page: “Everyone was afraid, no one could be trusted.”
Looking at the child, I forgot this woman was the wife of a landlord. I only saw a mom and her son. I left immediately, lest my feelings betray me.
The Great Cultural Revolution became more and more like a “geming”—the Chinese word for revolution, which means “killing life.”
Everyone was afraid, no one could be trusted. People just tried to protect themselves. In order to show their loyalty to the Party, wives betrayed husbands, husbands betrayed wives, children betrayed parents, and parents betrayed children. Families became hostile camps.
There was no safety, and no one knew when the disaster might come. One could go from a revolutionary to a counterrevolutionary in an instant.
A Shock in the Country
Then I, like tens of thousands of other youth, was settled down in the countryside near Harbin City, some 760 miles away.
The first day we went to the field to work with a peasant of either the poor or middle class named Wang Chun Shan, who was in his forties. During the break time, with us girls and him sitting together on the ground, he took out a sausage from his dirty pocket and ravenously chewed it in front of us.
We girl students stupidly asked him to tell us something about the past, the bitter old society before 1949—the Party had taught us to “recall the bitter past and appreciate the sweetness today.”
While still chewing he said, “It was a wonderful time before when we didn’t have the commune, before 1949. I had a very good time then. Those landlords or rich peasants, when they were in the busy season, they would hire us to help, and every family treated us so well that every meal would have meat with bok choy and noodles. It was delicious!”
We couldn’t control our faces and all at once our little brains did not work very well. We didn’t know what to do or where to go. But that Uncle Wang never noticed how we felt or cared about it at all. He just went on and on by himself, stubbornly wanting to set off an atom bomb in our brains.
“If you want to know when was the most difficult time, the saddest time, it was in the 1960s,” he said. “There was a big famine, and so many people died of hunger.”
We were so shocked, but did not act as stupidly as before. None of us said anything, and our faces betrayed nothing. We just sat there motionless and buried the question mark deep, deep in our hearts.
At the end of the year, when I returned home, I could not wait any longer. I talked with my dad in the den at the back of the house until late into the night. Why did the peasants I saw in our village all treat the landlords so respectfully, greeting them very kindly whenever they saw them? Why did they say the landlords are not evil?
Father said that the peasants were right, landlords are human. “How could they treat others, who were also their relatives, maliciously?” he said. “Your grandpa was a well known landlord in Ba Xian County in Hebei Province, and he was called by the villagers ‘Shanren.’” A “shanren” is a good person with a kind heart who always helped others.
I was surprised and a bit angry. “Why you didn’t tell me before? You let us believe those lies like idiots.”
“Who dared to,” he said. “People, especially young people, are all drunk with blood like it’s wine. They are so mad and crazy and will not listen to any reasonable words. Do you think anyone would believe me if I told the truth?
“Like you, you may immediately tell on me and try to kill me, just as they told you to do,” he said. “You may knock me to the ground, and then set your foot on my body and I would never be able to stand up again! I have not given up on life. I am not so stupid. I want to live.”
“Keep in mind, what we have spoken about tonight,” he said. “I will deny everything if you betray me. I will not admit to it. I will say you are just trying to get revenge on me, to frame me. I will deny it completely and there are no witnesses. I will say you are framing me! Do you hear me?”
His words were a shock and an unexpected sadness. There is a Chinese saying: sadness for man is having the heart die. Even if one has four limbs that move and a head that works, if the heart is no longer alive, can one be called human?
A Gentleman’s Goodness
The first day I came to the United States I was surprised by something. The small animals here, like squirrels, little birds, and ducks, were around everywhere and were not afraid of humans. Didn’t they know to protect themselves? Then, later on, I understood. Because no one would harm them, they didn’t bother to protect themselves. In China, no animals would act like that, because there is danger everywhere.
The kindness of Americans reminds me of an old saying that speaks of weighing the heart of a gentleman with a vicious man’s mind. On the one hand, a gentleman will be misunderstood or underestimated by a vicious man, who can’t understand his goodness. But on the other hand, if a gentleman judges a vicious man according to his gentleman’s heart, the gentleman will be in danger.
The CCP is not made up of gentlemen. The Party always talks about two hands. One hand holds tightly the weapons of the army and the security forces. The other hand holds what is called the soft knife, which is also called culture. The CCP uses this knife for penetration, for changing people’s minds without their knowing it. The CCP calls this “peacefully changing” others, which is more dangerous and terrible, transforming others without their having a chance to resist.
This is not mere theory. “The Red Detachment of Women” and other plays like it trained people to care nothing for life, to learn easily to struggle, fight, and kill. I am a witness to this.
Now I see “The Red Detachment of Women” on the stage of the Kennedy Center, in our nation’s capital. I don’t believe the people at the Kennedy Center understood that they were inviting the CCP to spread its poison here. But the time is getting late, and the good people of America need to wake up! There is evil abroad in the world and it wants to destroy us.
