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7

The Chinese CIA

After we moved into our new home in the western suburb of Beijing in 1957, I soon forgot the troubles Nainai and Second Uncle were having. My life at my parents’ work unit was filled with new thrills as well as new difficulties.

Our new home was located in a huge yard, many times larger than Nainai's compound. People called this place jiguan, which means mechanism. Later I learned that the jiguan we lived in was the Ministry of Investigation under the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, it was the Chinese CIA.

So of course everything in this big yard was a state secret. I remember once Father called me into his room and warned me that I should never tell a stranger the names of anyone who worked in the big yard or anything else. “For those are all state secrets,” he said with a seriousness in his voice.

That was exciting! That made me proud of my parents! In my imagination I compared them to those brave underground workers whom I saw in movies and heard about in stories. They all had important secrets to keep from the enemies. These secrets they would not reveal even though they were tortured and executed. Only hateful traitors would be afraid and sell out their comrades. As I grew up, I admired those unyielding revolutionary heroes and despised the traitors.

Yet the big yard did not look like the places I saw in the movies: dark, dangerous, filled with instruments of torture and stained by blood. If my memory is reliable, it was quite beautiful. When we first moved in, a few old barracks dating back to the warlord period still existed, testifying to the history of this place. Ancient weeping willows combed the sunshine. Large rose bushes covered with pink flowers stood among evergreen bushes. Cream-colored office buildings were of Russian styles. People called them by nicknames such as Airplane Building and Horseshoe Buildings. Beyond them, the western hills looked almost unreal, just a touch of blue against the blue sky.

Outside the yard were acres and acres of rice and lotus fields. “The red lotus is for seedpod; the white lotus is for roots.” Aunty used to tell me this. As for the lotus leaves, she used them to cover the rice porridge that she cooked over low heat. The porridge she made was light green with a fragrance.

Although it was serene, the big yard was no Peach Blossom Spring, where the people lived in nature without the knowledge of any kind of government. The big yard was guarded by fully armed People's Liberation Army soldiers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Anyone who wanted to come in or go out had to show a pass with their photo. Even children were no exception.

Only we often forgot to bring the passes. When this happened, we would try to slip through the gate, among a crowd, or behind the guards’ backs. Sometimes we succeeded. If we got caught, the soldiers would send us into the reception room, a brick house behind their sentry box. The old man there was very kind. He knew everybody's parents. When we came in, he would ask us how our parents were lately and then ring the bell. This time the soldiers would have to let us go in.

In those days we children were a lot of trouble for the soldiers. If somewhere there was an opening in the fence or a way to climb over the wall, soon the secret information spread out and we all took advantage of it without scruples. Usually these were shortcuts leading to the nearby Summer Palace where we went swimming in summer and ice-skating in winter.

The rest of the year I was in school. In 1957 I became a student in West Garden Elementary School, located just outside the big yard. Most of the students there were from inside the yard. Their parents were government officials who were called revolutionary cadres in China. Others were from a nearby hospital named Chinese Medicine Research Institute. Of the fifty students in my class, few were from workers’ families.

Looking back on it, I think a sense of superiority already existed among students who were from the big yard. But it was vague. Most of us were not as conscious of our parents’ positions as cadres’ children are today. Maybe it was because in the fifties people in China still believed Chairman Mao's teachings: “All our cadres, regardless of their ranks, are servants of the people.” “The people are the masters of the country.” “We should serve the people wholeheartedly.”

I remember once a girl in our class was ridiculed because her father was an ambassador. In Chinese, the word “ambassador” (dashi) had the same pronunciation as the word “big shit.” When the boys realized this, they were thrilled by it. They chased the poor girl all over the classroom, chanting in a chorus: “Oh, oh! Her father is a big shit!” The emphasis each time fell on the last two words. Soon the girl started to cry while she tried to deny that her father was an ambassador, or a big shit. It made quite a scene. Finally the teacher had to intervene. The boys were rebuked for their bad behavior and the girl was consoled.

If this incident was funny, another had more serious consequences. This time the girl who was jeered at by the boys was a manual worker's daughter. Perhaps her parents’ income was low. During the winter, her family did not have enough money to buy coal briquettes that most people in Beijing used at that time for cooking and heating. So each morning she had to go to the dump near our school to look for coal.

The work must have been hard. In winter at six thirty, it was still pitch-black outside and the northwest wind cut people's faces like sharp blades. At the dump, she had to dig out from the garbage the coal briquettes others had used the day before, knock them open one by one with an iron poker, and gather those that were still black in the middle. From time to time, the wind blew ashes into her eyes. As she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her face grew stained. Her nose was running from the cold. Her hands were chapped. She was wearing shabby clothes to save the better ones for school. It took her a long time to collect enough coal for her family. While she was doing this, her classmates were sleeping in their warm beds. Their apartments had central heating.

One morning a boy in our class saw her at the dump. Later he couldn't refrain from telling others about his discovery. Pretty soon everyone in our class heard about this. The boys chanted: “Yo! Yo! Cinderella! Picking coal stones!” The girl's face turned red, but she did not cry or try to deny it, as the other girl did. She merely sat there with her lips tightened. After that, she shunned her classmates during the day and went home as soon as class was over. The next year she disappeared from our class. Maybe she transferred; maybe she dropped out. She probably dropped out, since other schools were all quite far away. Nobody cared enough to find out about what happened to her. She had no friend in our class.

This small episode was soon forgotten. In 1958 people's minds were occupied by great things, such as the realization of communism in China. What was communism to me at that time? Well, my parents explained to me that communism was the ideal society for humankind, in which everybody was selfless and therefore everybody could take whatever he or she wanted. And no matter how much he or she took, there would always be an abundance of everything. So no one would need to worry about it. That was wonderful! I liked communism, for there were a few things that I definitely wanted to get: candies, popsicles, and above all, little person's books!

Little person's books in China were not only popular among children, even adults enjoyed reading them. They were half the size of a paperback book, from one to two hundred pages long. On each page was a black and white picture in a frame and underneath it a brief description of what was going on. The stories were of a wide variety: some were classical; others were foreign. Many were about revolutionary heroes.

Little person's books were not expensive. In those days, they cost about twenty Chinese cents apiece. Yet Father would give me only one for each week. That always happened on Saturday evenings, the beginning of our weekend when everyone was the happiest. As soon as dinner was over, I would follow him into his room and watch him unlock his big wooden bookcase. There a stack of new little person's books would appear in front of my eyes. All had been carefully selected by Father himself to make sure that the pictures were well drawn and the stories interesting. I loved reading these books! It was from them that I first got to know Monkey and Pigsy in Journey to the West, Zhuge Liang and his generals in Three Kingdoms, the one hundred and eight heroes in Water Margin as well as Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. I really wished that I could have all the books in Father's bookcase at once plus some others I saw at the bookstore. So I really looked forward to the realization of communism in China!

Perhaps the adults wanted something for themselves from communism as well. For they worked for it with such zeal that they forgot their meals, took no nap in the middle of the day, and often “spun round the axle,” a phrase invented at the time to mean working through the night into the day and then through the day into the night. Their slogan was “Make one day equal twenty years.”

That was the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, during which campaigns came and went like ocean waves. Everybody was involved. Everybody was a bit dizzy in the head. Once there was a campaign to raise the output of iron and steel, during which people all over China built small furnaces in their work units. Traditional methods were used to produce iron. We primary school students helped by going all over the big yard, collecting anything that we thought was iron. We dug up a lot of rusty nails, found a few bottomless basins and a broken chamber pot. Some students, fearing that their team might fall behind in the competition, stole iron woks and kettles from their own homes. I did not do such a thing, for I knew it would upset Aunty. Despite all the efforts, the iron produced in the big yard was no good.

The campaign to eliminate the four pests (flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows) was much more effective. For three days in a row, there was no class at school. What we did was to sit on top of our two-storied classroom buildings, beating drums and gongs, banging on the bottoms of iron basins and cooking pots, waving banners, and shouting at the top of our voices. This was a unified action. The idea was to have people all over Beijing make a great noise so that sparrows would have nowhere to land. In three days all of them would die of exhaustion. So we had a great time making noise on the roof. By the end of the third day, splendid results were reported from the battlefields. Thousands of sparrows had fallen from the sky, and so had numerous other birds, beneficial ones as well as harmful ones. Well, that was the necessary sacrifice sometimes one had to make for the revolution. Compared with communism, our paradise on earth, the death of some birds was a small price to pay.

Later Aunty got involved in this campaign too. In the summer of fifty-eight, instead of a nap, every day after lunch she would go out with a fly mat under her arm, a small stool, and a matchbox. Only she and I knew that she had a secret spot behind a man-made hill in the recreation area of the big yard. In the past kids must have urinated there, so the place smelled. The smell attracted flies, and the flies attracted Aunty. So for a whole summer there she was, sitting in the hot sun, waiting patiently for the flies to land. After she killed one, she would pick up the body carefully and put it in the matchbox. She did this not for communism though. She did this for my sake, knowing there was a competition going on in my school. Each day we were required to bring the flies we killed to school. The teachers would count them and write down the numbers on a chart. Needless to say, I never fell behind in this match.

Aunty was always willing to help me in any way she could, especially in 1958, for in that year all of a sudden she found that she hardly had anything to do. In order to prepare for the oncoming communism, various work units hurriedly set up dining commons, laundries, and kindergartens. My parents insisted that we all eat at the dining common, together with others, so as to practice living and thinking collectively. Meantime all our clothes went to a newly opened laundry co-op where the inexperienced workers, Aunty complained, ruined our silk and woolen clothes. My parents had a hard time convincing her that these were the negligible shortcomings of a new phenomenon, which we should continue to support.

In addition, my parents decided to send Lian, my younger brother, to kindergarten so as to plant the spirit of collectivism in him at the age of two. The kindergarten he went to was open to kids from the big yard only. People said it was excellent, because it was modeled on Russian kindergartens. It had a large playground, a sizable wading pool with a mushroom-shaped fountain in the middle, flush toilets, new bathtubs, and many expensive toys.

Besides the modern facilities, the teachers there were young and educated. Everyone had a diploma of some kind. This was indeed different from the old grandmas in neighborhood day care centers who would let the kids do almost anything they wanted to do. Lian's teachers, on the other hand, emphasized rules and discipline. For example, in this kindergarten the children went to the toilet according to a fixed schedule, which was scientifically designed. When the time came, everybody had to sit on a toilet and afterwards no one was allowed to go back again. He or she had to wait until the next time.

In this kindergarten, Lian was to stay six days and five nights a week. That made him miserable. Every Monday morning before he left home, he would stall for time and then he would start to cry. He looked pitiable indeed, like a little lamb on its way to the wolf's big mouth. My parents and Aunty had to promise him candies and toys so as to coax him into leaving home.

Then each Saturday afternoon when Aunty and I went to pick him up, we always saw him standing behind the iron fence watching the road. As soon as he saw Aunty, he waved his little hands and jumped with joy. As soon as we were out of the teachers’ earshot, he would start begging Aunty again: “Please let me stay home next week. I will be very good! I will help you do small things.” To this, Aunty had to say No many times.

On Lian's third birthday, Aunty got up early, boiled some eggs, and painted them red. In Beijing it was an old custom to give young “longevity stars” red eggs so that they would be healthy and have good luck during the year. The eggs Aunty made were very pretty. So pretty that I wanted all of them. But Aunty gave me only two. The rest she put in a basket and took to the kindergarten. Before long, however, she came back with tears in her eyes. It turned out that she was stopped at the gate, where she was told that family members were not allowed to see the kids during the week. Moreover they were not supposed to send food either. Birthday or no birthday. The rule was the rule. Aunty was so disappointed that she almost burst into tears in front of the teacher. So in the end, I had all the eggs.

Because Aunty felt uneasy getting paid by my parents without doing much work, when the next campaign came and Mother suggested that she learn to read and write, she eagerly said yes. This time the campaign was to wipe out illiteracy in China. From then on, each evening Mother and Aunty would sit down at a desk. Mother would teach Aunty several characters and the latter would spend hours the next day copying and trying to memorize them.

In 1958 Aunty was already fifty-six, an old woman by traditional standards, who did not even know how to write her own name. To start learning those complicated Chinese characters as elementary school students did—that was hard for Aunty, ten times harder than the household chores. Nonetheless she persisted. I never heard her complain that the lessons were too difficult or that Mother went too fast. Soon she was advanced enough to go to the night school that was set up during the campaign. There she got small red flags and paper satellites from her teachers after each quiz as a reward for her good work. When Aunty showed these to me, her face was beaming and she was as proud as a little girl. She would surely have continued, had the campaign not suddenly come to an end in less than a year. By that time, Aunty had learned over a thousand characters, which enabled her to read newspapers and write simple letters.

Years later this turned out a true blessing for me. In fact, it was the only good thing I could think of that came out of the Great Leap Forward. Why was this a blessing? In the seventies, after I worked on the pig farm for a few years, I began to feel very lonely. It seemed that the whole world had passed me by and I was stuck. A toad sitting in a deep well, watching the sky. No one understood me. No one cared to know about the predicament I had. My parents were as bad as others. Their letters echoed the newspaper editorials, saying that educated youths had a great future in the countryside. On top of that, I was very angry at myself, for volunteering and other things I had done. For a while it seemed there was no way out.

But Aunty kept writing to me. Her letters were short and simple, telling me how much she had missed me and how she longed day and night for me to come back so that we could live together once again. These letters warmed my heart and gave me courage to go on living. I don't know what would have happened to me if Aunty had not learned to read and write during the Great Leap Forward. Loneliness and despair might have engulfed me.