Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (8 page)

I soothed my guilty conscience by cleaning up after meals. To my dismay, Erica didn’t think washing dishes atoned for living well. She fought to be allowed to join Scarlet and the other students in the Big Canteen. “The Chinese revolution is all about ending special privileges,” Erica said to me.

“What if we put Chef Liu out of work?” I asked in a tiny voice.

Erica rolled her eyes and changed tactics. “By eating with the other students we can improve our language skills, and get to know them better,” she said. Personally, I thought it was better for my Chinese to gorge on homemade apple pie and chat up Chef Liu for recipes afterwards. But how could I argue with truth and justice? When Erica confronted the cadres in the Foreign Students Office, I stood shoulder to shoulder with her and tried to look sincere while wondering what Chef Liu was making for dinner. Cadre Huang broke into his whinnying laugh when she finished. When he picked himself up from the floor, he assured us our constitutions weren’t up to it.

“You’ll never
xi guani”
he predicted, using a Chinese verb (pronounced
see-gwah
) that means to get used to something unpleasant. In all the years I lived in China, people never stopped asking whether I was
xi guan
or not to the lack of meat, or central heating, or night life, which I always thought out-Canadianed Canadians at making self-deprecation a national sport. The polite answer, the only possible answer, was to shout heartily, “Xi
guaní”
(“I’m used to it!”), even if one had to say so while chewing on a particularly tough piece of dried yak penis.

Eventually, Erica’s rhetoric won the day. Three times a week, all that we were allowed, we joined the other hungry students massed around the canteen’s padlocked doors. When a cafeteria worker finally unlocked them, we burst through with anxious shouts. The Big Canteen looked like the prisoners’ mess in Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, a dark sea of plank benches and rough tables. Clutching our own enamel bowls, we lined up at a tiny window for a ladleful of slop. Three miserable meals in the Big Canteen, while cheap for me, were the equivalent of about half a day’s pay for the average Chinese worker.

As the daughter of a restaurateur, I never dreamed Chinese food could be so bad. Breakfast and dinner were identical: tasteless
cornmeal mush, with a teaspoonful of inedible salted vegetables. Lunch, the only time my classmates ate meat, was a sliver or two of pork fat mixed with stale cabbage. The rice was dry and tasteless, broken grains, more gray than white, polluted with tiny fragments of gravel and coal. I learned to chew carefully to avoid breaking a tooth. We were lucky to get the rice, classified as fine grain. Several times a week, we also had to eat our share of coarse grain, usually in the form of
wotou
, which were baseball-sized conical lumps of steamed cornmeal that looked and tasted like damp sawdust.

My classmates were so undernourished that they usually ate every scrap, and, after a while, even I found the morsels of pork fat pretty tasty. One day, I saw a blackboard propped on a central table, displaying three half-eaten yams and a small pile of salted vegetables. The canteen workers had chalked a blistering message: “The students lack class feeling for the workers in the kitchen! Each piece of food is the result of the sweat and blood of the workers and peasants. The students don’t respect the labor of the workers! What is worse, the students are losing touch with their class background. Before when you were all workers, peasants and soldiers, you never would have wasted any food.”

Erica was a Maoist with sparkling eyes and pink cheeks who loved Miles Davis, admired the Black Panthers and hated the Vietnam War. We each were eternally relieved to have the other’s company for the moments when homesickness struck. She was something of a celebrity in China, having stolen the show during the four-and-a-half-hour audience her father’s delegation had had with Zhou Enlai. Intrigued by the chance to talk to an American teenager, the premier had quizzed Erica about everything from the youth movement to Chinese politics. He wondered out loud whether young people abroad were aware that two of Mao’s closest associates “betrayed the original goals” of the proletarian revolution.

“I ask you,” Premier Zhou said to Erica. “Would you care to tell us who these two people were?”

“One is Liu Shaoqi and the other is Lin Biao,” Erica said, standing up respectfully.

“You are so right!” Zhou said delightedly, bounding out of his seat to shake her hand.

Thanks to Erica, I spent the year being the class dunce. While I could hardly say “I’m from Canada,” she was already fluent, having grown up in Silver Spring, Maryland, speaking Chinese at home. Sadistically, the Foreign Students Office once invited a professor from the math department to lecture us on some new theory about something. At the end, he tossed math problems at us like peanuts to chimpanzees. My basic arithmetic skills were shaky in English, never mind Chinese, never mind
sans
paper, pencil and eraser, calculator and multiplication tables. I sat there glumly while Erica, the Yale math major, figured out all the answers in her head. The math professor was so excited he clapped heartily at each correct answer.

Erica was not only better at math, she was always more politically correct, too. With her again leading the charge to remold our minds, we petitioned to join our Chinese roommates in physical labor. I felt it was important not just to witness the Chinese revolution but to live it. According to a famous Mao quotation: “Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is by living in its environment … If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing a reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself … If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”

Again Cadre Huang laughed hysterically and predicted we would not
xi guan
. He finally gave in, only after Erica laid some heavy Black Panther-style rhetoric on him. From then on, every second Saturday, we dug ditches and hauled bricks to help build a new university library. Cultural Revolution dogma held that by getting dirty, we would become better human beings. During the breaks, I wiped my sweaty face and checked my world outlook. To my chagrin, I felt little change. But I thought it was kind of smart of school authorities to make us dig ditches. The subliminal message was:
Study hard! Or else this could be YOUR life!

At the time, I didn’t understand that Beijing University was a stronghold of Mao’s wife and her radical cohorts (who would be
labeled the Gang of Four after their purge). Madame Mao’s campaigns directly affected the school – and our lives. In 1972, for instance, the university responded to the campaign to “deepen the revolution in education” by scheduling more and more physical labor. One rainy Sunday authorities announced that we had to dig a hole for a new swimming pool. Only I objected. “Why not wait until it stops raining?” I said. “Even peasants avoid working in the rain.” Everyone politely waited for me to finish speaking. Then we all went out into the rain.

Although all my classmates were classified as worker-peasant-soldier students, few were actually children of the proletariat. Scarlet, the daughter of a nurse and a mid-level administrator in Beijing, was classified as a peasant because she had worked for several years in Yanan, the Communists’ dusty wartime capital. To my surprise, she was not a Party member. “Too obvious,” she told me years later. “You would have felt like you were being watched.” Of course, we
were
being watched, although in my innocence I didn’t realize that at the time.

Scarlet’s job was to tattle on me to Luo Ning, who
was
a Party member. A self-assured young soldier of the People’s Liberation Army, she had freckles and wore her thin brownish hair in wispy braids tucked into her red-starred army cap. Luo Ning reminded me of a bossy mother hen, and with her pear-shaped figure, she even waddled like one. Her air of authority came naturally. Her father was Marshal Luo Ronghuan, a Politburo member and one of China’s ten marshals, the nation’s highest military rank.

I didn’t know that Luo Ning had been raised as a Red Princess, with servants, bodyguards and limousines. Nor did I realize that her playmates included Deng Xiaoping’s daughters, who moved in temporarily to console Luo Ning and her sister after Marshal Luo died in 1963. Her father’s early demise – he had served with both Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping — apparently saved Luo Ning from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of being sent to a farm for hard labor, she joined the army, then a prestigious assignment. From there, she easily got into Beijing University.

As secretary of the class Communist Youth League, Luo Ning was often so busy remolding other students that Scarlet gave her
reports to another party member, Wang Lizhi, who was both class president and chairman of the history departments student association. Wang hadn’t won any popularity contests; the Communist Party had appointed her to these posts because she was tough and reliable. Built like a bull, with coarse features and a husky voice, Wang knew how to use a gun and could wrestle someone to the ground. The daughter of a steelworker, she had been a security guard at Daqing, the oil refinery in northeast China crowned by Mao as the national model for industry. “My job was to protect Daqing Oil Fields from class enemies and saboteurs on the inside, and from imperialist attacks from the outside,” Wang told me.

Erica and I had no idea our roommates were reporting on us to Wang Lizhi. Of all my classmates, she was the only one to persist in practicing English with me. “Long live the friendship between the Chinese and Canadian peoples!” she would shout, her face reddening with the effort. So when we heard that Wang was about to turn twenty, we decided to buy her some birthday presents. But what? We feared anything too good might be construed as an attempted seduction of an upright Party member. Erica bought her walnuts and, as a joke, composed a Chinese limerick praising her virtues. I settled on a bag of candies and a Double Happiness ping-pong ball. That evening after supper, we knocked on her door and pranced into her room, singing “Happy Birthday.” When we gave her the presents, Wang went white, then beet red.

“Happy Birthday,” Erica and I shouted.

“No! No!” Wang shouted in her terrible English, recoiling as if we had given her a copy of Richard Nixon’s quotations. “Bad! Bad!” she cried, wagging a finger in front of our noses. Erica and I were mortified, but there was no graceful exit. We had to finish what we started. Wang read the limerick aloud and frowned, remonstrating Erica for the fulsome praise. “A Party member must be modest!” she said.

We smiled weakly. Even Erica’s fluent Chinese failed her; she didn’t know how to say limerick in Chinese and couldn’t explain it wasn’t meant literally. Wang pinned me against the wall and tried to shove the ping-pong ball back in my pocket. Finally, perspiring with embarrassment, Erica and I managed to escape.

Just before National Day, on October 1, 1972, my classmates decided to have a party. “Let’s
warn”
Scarlet said, using the verb
to play. My first Chinese college bash!
I thought excitedly. It turned out to be more like a birthday party for four-year-olds. We gathered in one student’s room, under full-strength fluorescent lights. Half a dozen of us – all females — sat demurely in a circle, crunching sunflower seeds and sipping tea. Everyone giggled. Even though I couldn’t see what was so funny, I found myself having a good time. No one had anything as fine as a cassette player, so we had to provide our own entertainment. We went around the circle, browbeating each person into singing operatic arias and revolutionary songs. They were all accomplished singers, a skill drummed into them in nursery school. But when it came my turn, I forgot the words to “O, Canada” the only Canadian song I could muster. Erica, who carried a tune as badly as I did, decided there was safety in numbers. Together we chirped our tuneless way through “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Kumbaya, My Lord,” but neither of us knew how to translate “Kumbaya.” For an encore, we performed a country hoe-down square dance, which needed no translation. Then we all went back to our rooms to study. The next day no one had a hangover.

(From left) Erica, Luo Ning and Forest Zeng
.