Читать книгу A Time of Ghosts - Hok-Pang Tang - Страница 10

Long before the Communists came to power I had decided what high school I wanted to attend. On my way to elementary school I daily passed through the foreign quarter – fine homes surrounded by strong iron fences – swimming pools – tennis courts. It was like visiting another country. The foreigners fascinated me. I looked at them with great interest as they walked their dogs. Their lives seemed so luxurious. Just the can of three tennis balls used for their game cost half a month’s wages for a Chinese.

Continuing beyond the foreign quarter by ferry and floating down the Pearl River toward the harbor, one came to a stop called “The Repose of the White Flamingo.” There one saw even more important-looking foreigners carrying luggage and passing to and fro. It was a beautiful area, and one of my father’s clients not only lived there but was a big landowner in that district. He once invited our whole family on a cruise. As we drifted through the region, he stated simply, “I own the land as far as the eye can see.” He was indeed a wealthy and powerful man, and was always accompanied by bodyguards.

The most interesting thing for me was a small island filled with red and white flamingos. They flocked in great numbers, and when they rose into the air, half the sky was darkened. Hunting them was not only prohibited by law, but also enforced by an old, pious legend in which an immortal descended from Heaven on the back of a white flamingo, responding to the prayers of the people of the province for help during terrible floods.

It was a very pleasant day as we sailed leisurely among the landlord’s holdings. When we disembarked and wandered on foot, we saw at close hand great pools of fish raised for market. As we came to the beach, the landlord pointed out a man walking on the sand in the distance – a trespasser. He turned to a bodyguard. “Shoot at him and put a scare into him!” he ordered, and the bodyguard opened fire. The man fled in terror, and we continued our walk past pools filled with blooming lotuses.

My father had brought along a friend of his, a fortuneteller who did not say much. When our trip through that land of wealth and power came to an end and we were off the landlord’s estate, the fortuneteller said matter-of-factly to my father, “This man shall die an unnatural death. His fortune shall be lost.” I smirked and thought it very funny. How could bad luck possibly come to such a man? Yet when the Communists came to power, the landlord was arrested and hanged. His body was not permitted burial, and all his estates and possessions were confiscated.

It was in this region, near the Repose of the White Flamingo, that a group of American Christians opened a school amid beautiful farmlands. It was sited on a small peninsula jutting into the Pearl River near the South China Sea, some twenty miles outside of Canton. The buildings were in the Western style, the teaching was Western, and even the teachers, though Chinese, dressed and acted like Westerners. One had to be very wealthy to study there. The principal was a friend of the American ambassador. After the Communists gained control, the Westerners were expelled but the school continued in operation, with some of the old staff even being retained.

I remember passing down the beautiful walkway, overarched with tall bamboos, that stretched from the river beach to the school. The grounds were like a vast college estate. One entered through a very un-Chinese arch, and the most prominent building – the chapel – was topped by a cross.

Under the Communists the school got a new principal. He had been the former principal’s assistant. He ate with a fork instead of chopsticks, and had been educated in America. It was hard to tell by watching him that he was Chinese.

It became my high school.

Our formal studies there took about half a day. We were awakened at 5:30 in the morning, and exercised for half an hour with swimming or long-distance running. Then came breakfast – a thin, tasteless rice porridge that I detested. The wealthy students had better fare – different grades of food for different levels of income, in spite of Communist theory. The porridge was served in a huge, open wooden vat. Though unappetizing, we took a lot because we were hungry. Then we sat down and spooned it into our mouths while peeking across the room at the far more interesting and varied food set before the well-to-do.

After breakfast came the flag salute, daily announcements, and a very boring Communist meeting and lecture. Then we went to our classes. We studied among relics of the school’s past – tables and chairs that had been there for years, but were now rickety and sometimes broken.

The quality of the teaching varied greatly. Some teachers – leftovers from the old school – had studied in Europe or America, and knew what was what. On the other end of the scale was our political science teacher, a very poorly-educated fellow discharged from the army.

We were not taught in Cantonese – our own language – because Mao Tse-Tung, inspired by the ancient Emperor of the Chin Dynasty who unified the Chinese writing system, decided to do the same for the spoken language. All instruction was to be in Mandarin Chinese. That presented considerable difficulty for our instructors, most of whom were Cantonese. They tried to speak Mandarin to us, but it came out strangely distorted and comical. Often we had no idea what they were trying to say.

The students were a mixed lot consisting of easily recognized factions. It was at that time fashionable for foreign-born Chinese in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and England to send their children to China for education, and many of them settled in our school. They stood out from the rest of us by the cut and quality of their clothes and by the many little luxuries they enjoyed. Some even had pornographic magazines. They would ride about the neighborhood streets on their motorcycles, with admiring girls seated behind them. They made up the first faction.

The second faction consisted of farmers’ sons fresh from the countryside, as well as the offspring of ordinary workers. The Communists made special arrangements for such disadvantaged young people to come and study. They were an obvious contrast to the well-heeled foreign born. The country boys had poor manners, bare feet, and wore worn and patched clothing. The one thing the two socially distinct factions had in common was the low quality of their academic achievement. The foreign-born were simply not interested in school, but wanted only to have a good time. They paid others to do their homework and to slip them answers during tests. The farm boys and workers, representing the noble proletariat so venerated by Communism, were accorded class offices, including that of class president.

The third faction comprised children of high military officers. The teachers treated them with a somewhat fearful respect, and passed them as a matter of form, no matter how poor their test results. Their misdeeds were ignored and they were not subject to the punishments inflicted on others. And they had privileges – special rooms, access to information from the central government, and special foreign language classes to prepare them for high roles in the New China.

I belonged to a suspect faction – those of small means whose family histories were considered tainted by non-Communist thought. I was among the poor and common students. I did not belong to any of the social cliques, and was very lonely. It was not that they excluded me, just that I did not fit comfortably with any of them. I felt very out-of-place.

I did my studies and performed well academically, but I hated political science. It was the same dry slogans and tiresome tales repeated over and over again. I simply could not bear it, and finally found relief by inclining my head toward the open schoolbook on my desk while reading novels surreptitiously held on my knees and out of sight of the teacher. Inevitably, however, I was discovered, and was forced to sit erect, at attention, with my hands held behind my back. I was so irritated by this that I rebelled by repeatedly picking at my ears or nose, knowing that it would bother the instructor. In spite my good test results in that class, the teacher gave me bad grades based on my obviously negative attitude.

Afternoons, we were free to exercise or study or participate in this or that group. Most informal clubs were devoted to team sports or music or some such harmless activity, but there was one we all hated intensely – the political group. It was made up exclusively of unpleasant little toadies who considered it their Communist duty to spy on the other students and to report any “anti-revolutionary” attitudes or actions to the school authorities. They were always on the watch, and we learned to choose our words carefully because very little was private. By their reports, students could be expelled and teachers arrested. They were very subtle and quite without conscience. I recall one particularly unpleasant example.

Most of the teachers found their jobs humdrum and boring, and their sentiments rubbed off on the students. The science teacher, however, was an exception. He was very knowledgeable. He obviously liked teaching and enjoyed young people. I caught his enthusiasm, and listened to his lively discourses with great interest. Then one day in our after-breakfast political meeting, a student stood up and accused him of being a spy. The police came and pulled him away in handcuffs. Science class then sank to the same mind-numbing level as the other courses.

Also in the afternoons came military training. The “countryside/worker” students were given real guns and bullets with which to practice. Most others were considered bad security risks, and their studies were in theory rather than practice. I was allowed the real thing and became quite proficient at target practice, until someone began checking into my background. Then I abruptly was no longer permitted to handle real firearms, and joined the excluded in the theoretical use of weapons.

There was a point behind this. I and those like me had watched our fortunes decline under Communism. The country people and workers, on the other hand, were so miserable under the Old Regime that Communism was actually a small step up. Consequently they had a vested interest in its continuation, while we were considered under suspicion of harboring motives of revenge, so the Communists did not want firearms in our hands. Our files contained the identifying “Controlled Youth” label that meant we were to be watched and not trusted. No important positions were to be given us.

We were taught military science by an army officer stationed at our school specifically for that purpose. All he knew was the army and fighting. He could neither read nor write. Nonetheless, he was not the ogre one might have expected. He was friendly with the students, and unknowingly provided them with a great deal of entertainment.

Actually the entertainment came from his wife. She was a rather inelegant country woman brought along with him to take up residence at the school. She had a predilection for wandering about their rooms in her undergarments, a habit soon noticed with great excitement by the student body. It was not long before her windows were objects of intense youthful scrutiny, and she became the unwitting catalyst for endless juvenile speculations involving sex.

In the evenings came dinner. Huge wooden vats of rice were placed on the dining room floor, and students served themselves with giant ladles. The food was remarkably bad. Some steamed vegetables or paper-thin slices of meat were placed at each table. Because there were eight students per table, the vegetables or meat had to be divided into eight parts. This was a delicate process fraught with all kinds of social and political implications. Some of the more powerful students gave special consideration in the division to their friends or sex partners. I did not want any trouble, so I just took whatever amount fell to my lot. It was always small.

The well-off students supplemented their diet with all sorts of delicacies brought in from outside – food from their families or purchased in shops near the school. I was not so well off, but nonetheless my mother managed to supply me with thousand-year eggs or chili paste to stimulate my offended appetite. Without such added flavors the rice was hardly bearable. It was often infested with insects. Once a dead mouse was found in it.

Though most of the students were boys, there were a few girls as tokens of the “modern” Communist attitude toward the equality of the sexes. They were allowed to take classes with the boys and to eat with them. But the girls were given less food. Their living quarters were, of course separate. Some boys could not overcome their curiosity, one of my friends among them. He sneaked into the dressing area and secretly eyed the girls as they showered. He was discovered and sent to labor camp.

Like many adolescents, I was both pleased and made uncomfortable by the presence of girls. It seemed that I intimidated them and they intimidated me. My attitude toward sex had been formed largely by the Daoist and Buddhist leanings of my family. Masturbation was considered almost criminal, because through it one lost energy and damaged the body. Buddhism taught that the most beautiful of women is essentially just a skeleton. And in martial arts study, I learned that having sex was like using a knife to cut years from one’s life. I was interested in sex and interested in girls, but did nothing about it. Occasionally I would have a sex dream that left me feeling guilty and depressed.

I was aware that some books talked openly about sex, and even about sexual methods and tools – but I could not read them. My father would not even allow me to read love stories. But in spite of everything, I found girls both attractive and dangerously inviting. My only foray into romance, however, consisted of an odd, unspoken agreement I had with a delicately pretty girl. Each day we would sit at the same table to eat. We would arrive at the same time and leave at the same time. We never exchanged one word.

Some of the far more sexually sophisticated wealthy boys set up a sort of business in which they would rent out their pornographic magazines through a middle man. I knew what was going on, and it made me very curious. I too wanted to see what was in the exciting magazines, but could not bring myself to spend any of my meager funds on them, so I never saw what they contained. The foreign-born pornography king was eventually found out and was forced to transfer to another school. His middleman, much lower on the socio-economic scale and therefore more vulnerable, was put in jail. He was accused of encouraging anti-revolutionary social decay, and suffered a heavy punishment. Anyone who had looked at the magazines was forced to write a letter of confession and was suspended for a couple of weeks. Those of higher power status were excused. Those of lower were expelled.

To me the incident had been blown greatly out of proportion. It was just some teenagers expressing their curiosity about sex. But for some involved, it meant punishments ranging beyond expulsion to ten years in labor camp. I was appalled at the difference in punishment, and that it was based more on one’s family background than on the nature of the act.

Many of the boys did not bother to shower or clean up because there was no warm water. My solution was sneaking out at night and furtively making my way to the river for a swim. If lucky, I might be able to catch a frog, a snake or bird, and grill it over a fire near the river to satisfy my seemingly constant hunger, which was usually exacerbated during the day by watching the rich kids buy food at the roadside cafeteria on campus.

Officially, evenings were devoted to two hours of study, then lights out at 9:30. For some however, that was when the evening’s entertainments began – an aspect of school life in which I did not participate – covert homosexual relations.

We all slept together in the dormitory, sometimes two boys to a bed. The opaque mosquito nets over each bed gave opportunity not only for undetected study with a flashlight past hours, but also for sex among some of the boys. Often relationships formed between a young boy new to the school and an older boy assigned to be his guide and mentor. I found no attraction in this, but was repeatedly pressured to participate. I politely declined. That pestering finally came to a halt after a field trip to the countryside. One of the farm boys we encountered took a dislike to me, and kept harassing me until I beat some respect into him. After that there were no more homosexual overtures made to me at school.

My curious mind got me in trouble. One day a teacher was instructing us. “Communism,” he said, “is like Heaven. Capitalism is like Hell.” I turned this over and over in my mind. I felt I must be misunderstanding something, so I asked the teacher, “If Communism is like Heaven, why are the people leaving Communist East Germany to go to the West? Why are people leaving China for Hong Kong? Why do they want to leave Heaven and go to Hell?” My remark was really made in innocence. I was just looking for the explanation of this puzzle. But it was taken as a serious attack on Communist theory, and I was exposed to much unpleasant grilling to find out where I had picked up such an anti-revolutionary concept.

I was not the only student naive enough to get in trouble by ill-chosen comments. One student foolishly reported a dinner table conversation between his parents, in which they remarked on the shortage of cooking oil – that there seemed to be less and less as time passed, and there was not enough food. The student’s casual comments were reported to the police, and he was interrogated before the entire school. In their sly way, they told the boy his parents would not be taken away if he talked, and they added, “We always keep our promise.” They said that in front of everyone. The boy told all, and his parents were arrested and jailed. When news of the event spread through the school, I stood up and asked, “Why did the police not keep their promise?”

The reply was that the Revolution took precedence over everything. One could forget about promises for the benefit of the Revolution. One could kill mother, father, and relatives for the Revolution. One could do anything at all for the benefit of the Revolution. I was horribly shocked. Such great evil, I thought – that is Communism!

Because of the Korean War and the resulting anti-Western propaganda, everything Western was banned, whether American or English. China turned away from Capitalist America and Europe and toward Communist Russia. Russian fabrics suddenly appeared on the markets in large quantities at cut-rate prices. Russian literature became available, and Russian films appeared in the theaters. We were shown movies on how the Iron Curtain countries had advanced. Instead of Chinese culture, we studied Pavlov and Tolstoy.

Though there were political problems between China and Russia – even overt border disputes – to mention such disagreements was considered criminal. We were taught to look on Joseph Stalin as a grandfather. When he died, everyone in my school had to visit the Russian ambassador to offer condolences. We all had to wear black armbands and weep, and when a boy laughed during the three minutes of memorial silence he was expelled from school and jailed. I nearly laughed as well at all the foolish and insincere antics, but I jabbed myself in the side hard enough to stifle any chuckles.

While I was in high school, Chinese society changed drastically. First Mao got it into his head that if China had more people, everything would function better. His view was based on nothing more profound than the notion from his farm-boy background that more children meant more work accomplished. In this, of course, he disagreed completely with the views of Western population experts such as Malthus. One of his advisors, a student of Malthus, counseled birth control. He said that industry could not expand enough to feed the billions of people that would result from indiscriminate childbearing. Mao had him jailed, and the official proclamation became that everyone should have more children. Those who did so were rewarded. And because in traditional China more children meant more luck, the poorly educated were happy to comply with Mao’s new project. The result was that the population took an abrupt upward leap. In a few short years there was a shortage of fabric, of food, and of schools.

Then came the equally misguided project Mao called the “Great Leap Forward.”

Each farmer was ordered to increase production to a certain level. The people, already burdened by taxes, were on the edge of hunger. To carry out Mao’s decree, they crowded enough rice seedlings to plant ten acres onto only one acre. Because they were set so closely into the mud, there was no air circulation and the rice rotted. Fearful local officials, not willing to make Mao’s theory look bad, nonetheless reported that production had increased ten to one hundred fold.

The Central officials, reading such inflated outright lies, thought that Mao’s plan was a great success, and based on the amazing increase in production statistics, they decided that everyone could get food free in the communes and eat as much as they liked. Everybody was to stop cooking at home and to eat in the communal dining halls. One of the first consequences of this was that the government decided, in view of the increased production, to raise taxes ten to one hundred times to fit the situation. Then came the realization that the warehouses had become emptied of what rice there was.

People began to starve. They ate anything they could find – the bark of trees, squeezed-out sugar cane stalks – even mud. The wild environment, both plant and animal, was decimated by people looking for something – anything – to eat. In the countryside parents exchanged children with other families because they could not bear to eat their own offspring – but they could eat the children of others. It was a very low point in the history of China. And amid this disaster no high-level government official would criticize Mao’s insane policy except one, General Pang. But no one listened to the old veteran of the Korean War when Pang said boldly that the “Great Leap Forward” was a great leap backward. He was dismissed from office and the insanity continued.

Mao was very anxious for Chinese industrial production to surpass the West. His measure of advancement became the production of steel. Everyone in China had to become involved in making steel. Word went through our school that all students were to go out and search the region for old nails, iron woks, spades, iron bars, locks, any kind of scrap metal. Individuals had to forfeit all such items to the government for the greater good. All that we gathered was put into a big pot and placed in one of the countless new furnaces built of mud that were constructed all across China. Then the furnace was fired with poor-quality coal to a temperature high enough to melt the contents of the pot together. The intensely hot liquid metal was poured out into earthen molds, and thus bars of primitive pig iron resulted. That useless process was considered “producing steel.” Of course there were many accidents in such a dangerous procedure, particularly when undertaken by ordinary people and students such as ourselves.

All thought of studies was forgotten. Day and night the pupils of the school were scouring the countryside for scrap iron, and laboring in front of the mud furnaces. We all had quotas to fill. Normal factory production ceased so that all effort could be directed to steel making. The result was that our useless, low-grade metal was everywhere. The same could be said of the whole country. It was of such abysmal quality that it was good for nothing. Horrible accidents in which people were burned multiplied. Everyone was in dismay over what was happening but no one could speak out or they would be jailed. It was as though we were all forced to carry out the arbitrary wishes of a heavily armed madman in an insane asylum.

At the height of the madness my parents did a very unwise thing. They composed a lengthy letter, presented at a political meeting, in which they spoke out forcefully against the diversion of the nation’s energies toward the making of steel. They could no longer keep silent while so many were suffering and dying. They were then branded anti-Revolutionaries.

In spite of the great failure of his policies, Mao expressed no sense of error or regret. Crop failure was blamed on natural causes instead of the foolishness of his plans. The official explanation was that agricultural production had dropped due to large numbers of birds and rats. That was to be the next great national crusade – the extermination of birds and rats. We, along with everyone else in China, were set to catching them. In my school we were required to present a filled quota of some fifteen to twenty rat tails and birds’ feet to the Communist supervisors to show how involved we were in Mao’s latest project. So many creatures were exterminated that they became very hard to find, and it was not long before rat tails and birds’ feet became a black market item. Those turned in to officials were simply recycled. The officials knew it was all a farce, so they sold them back to the people, who simply turned them in again.

And so it went, on and on. The officials submitted inflated reports to the government. The extermination of birds led, of course, to a great increase in the number of insects. So then we were set to killing flies. It was like setting a whole nation to do the bidding of fools. Nonetheless we were all trapped. So I, like the others, planted rice too thick. When it rotted, we gathered all the harvest we could from some ten acres and piled it all together on one acre, then took a picture to make it look like production was booming. Along with the others I made worthless steel, killed birds and rats, and swatted flies.

Those had become the measures of our school achievement. Learning was all but forgotten. What I absorbed of academic subjects during those years, I learned in home schooling from my well-educated parents. What I learned at school was the incredible folly of mankind.