Rightist Memoir XXVIII: The Latter Period of the Chinese Communist Dictatorship

Chapter Eleven  The Latter Period of the Chinese Communist Dictatorship

The elimination at the outset of all opposing forces meant that when the bloody twenty-eight year long rule of the demon king Mao came to an end a force that could replace the Chinese Communists had not yet arisen and so the Chinese people had to tolerate the status quo. Even so history turned a new page when on October 6, 1976, after ten years of “Cultural Revolution”, the palace rebellion of the “capitalist roaders”, whom Mao had viewed as terrible monsters and had repressed and had wanted to wipe out, succeeded.

During his twenty-eight years of tyrannical rule, that bandit Mao reduced the nation to misery and starvation. All the necessities of life including food, cloth, oil and salt, fuel had to be furnished using “ration coupons” and not merely luxurious accommodations and transportation. As the superstition, ignorance and fear created by Mao Zedong gradually dissipated, people started to turn to the practicalities of daily life. 

Deng Xiaoping decided to replace the fanaticism of the class struggle with a “stress on economic construction”.  They chose an opportunistic policy of smoothing over the contradictions in the system but still refusing to implement democracy. They took up political power as a magic wand to do what they wanted and were unwilling to relinquish it. While they said that they were unwilling to surrender the power they had seized, they wanted to replace Mao Zedong’s one-man dictatorship with a period of collective leadership in order to carry out peaceful reforms. The new historical period took shape under that policy. 

In 1978, the “capitalist roaders” who had just taken power focused on two major reforms: 

• First, in order to boost the national economy then teetering on “the brink of collapse”, they wanted to return to China’s people the means to make a living that Mao had taken from them, bring agriculture back from the dead. Their rescue policy was a return to Liu Shaoqi’s 1962 policy “land assigned to the peasants for their private use, private markets, and people being personally responsible for profits and losses.” “三自一包”
• Second, in order to adjust the very tense social structure established by Mao Zedong, they freed the old Communist officials of various ranks who had been sent down work in the countryside and made them the new masters of the machinery of state governance and purged the “Rebel Faction” who had supported the “Cultural Revolution”. (That kind of changing the superficial but not changing the essentials greatly impeded the progress of social democracy.)

At the same time, in order to win the people’s support, they completely erased the distinction of the “Five Categories” that Mao had drawn. This included rehabilitating the innocent victims of the 1957 anti-rightist campaign. 

The third session of the Eleventh Congress of the Communist Party of China began the large-scale rehabilitation of people who had been wrongly accused. For a moment, it seemed as if everything had changed.

Our generation felt the humiliation of nearly a century of China being divided up amongst the great powers.  Thus we had absorbed from childhood the generally acknowledged social value of  “revitalize China and dedicate ourselves to our country”.  After being aroused by the loss of our home and country to the Japanese invasion, this had become the one overriding value. No matter who or was or what their political background might be, the most important principle was a determination to serve their country.  Unfortunately, we hadn’t realized that Mao’s Communists in order to seize power had already relinquished a large part of the national territory to the Soviet Union!

At the time the label of rightist was unjustly applied to me, I was panic-stricken and afraid.  I feel the shame of that day even today. I had been unjustly robbed of my chance to study. I was devastated but I never thought about what had caused my personal disaster. When I was studying at university I understood nothing about politics. 

During those repeated criticism sessions, I not only didn’t stand up with justice on my side and criticize those kinds of conspiracies and persecutions, I was always trying to defend myself and explain my own actions.  I said that I had never opposed Communist ideas. 

– 485 –

However, the more I gave an explanation for my actions, the more intense the persecution became. My defense of myself not only did not win forgiveness but on the contrary made me become a “totally incorrigible extreme rightist”. 

1. The Windvane Turns?

Harsh reality corrected my naivete. The way Mao was always talking nonsense that made no distinctions between true and false and filled with misrepresentations, made me realize that communist propaganda aimed to deceive people. I therefore chose my political path, not because of my family background, but because of all the nonsense of the Communist Party.

Throughout my twenty three years in prison, I thought of my own personal difficulties in the context of the disasters that China was suffering. My struggles in prison made me ever more determined to oppose faith in the dictator. Therefore I started my own authentic “personal transformation” and started a new intellectual and spiritual life and became a determined soldier in the fight against the dictatorship. 

For over twenty years, I kept on making reasoned arguments against the unjust charges against me. From the day I went to prison until the time of my rehabilitation in 1979, I persisted in making over one hundred appeals. 

All this made clear the infinite injustices of that era but it also protected me in a strange way. My fight against tyranny and autocracy alternated between appealing for redress of the unjust charges against me and resistance. My appeals exposed the bloody, ruthless and tyrannical and corrupt procedures of the Communist Party. 

In 1978, my mother sent me the good news that she had been rehabilitated. The redress of the cases of people who had been falsely accused was like a warm breeze that thawed the hell frozen by decades of Mao Zedong’s despotism. Many souls who had been moaning locked in Hell as well as people throughout China who had been put in the “Five Black Categories”  got out of Hell. 

I thought that I would be able to take advantage of this “rehabilitation campaign” to erase the false accusations against me and walk out the gate of hell all free and aboveboard.  At the same time I decided that I would tell the story of what I had seen and heard during my twenty years in prison and tell the tale so future generations and all the world would know the facts about the long sufferings and tortures suffered by the prison slaves and the bloody sacrifice of the many martyrs who died there. 

Faraway Yanyuan was like a block of ice locked in a corner where the sun did not shine. There was delay after delay as the ice and snow there refused to melt. The authorities of Prison 909 seemed to have no reaction at all to the rehabilitation of people implicated in “unjust, falsified and mistaken cases”. There had been no propaganda about “implementing the policy” and I had no idea of the number of people released after the judgements against them had been corrected. 

In those days, the letters I exchanged with my mother were still all being routinely opened. I had to use veiled language with the censors in mind to tell her of the humiliations of twenty years imprisonment and the sadness of making twenty years of appeals without result.  For the privilege of corresponding with my mother I was forced to write many insincere falsehoods. 

My experience would show that even after being relieved of the false accusations long held against me, I would still have to undergo a long painful process with many twists and turns. From the very beginning, He Qingyun and Xu Shikui did not see the two hundred-odd exiles of the Sixth Brigade as human beings. How could they accept that now they would have to rehabilitate these extremely reactionary fellows?  They were afraid that the rehabilitation of those two hundred people would not work to their advantage. 

A year earlier, when Liu Shunsen and Liu Kaiyun had been shot, Xu Shikui had ferociously warned “those people who are obstinately opposed to confessing their guilt and obeying the law” are responsible for their own destruction. Now the wind was suddenly blowing from another direction in the direction of the rehabilitation of the rightists.  Could they accept that? They were afraid that the release of these men would not be to their own advantage. This trick of changing but not really changing troubled us deeply. 

– 486 –

It was only Ma Dapao, a “free spirit” who was always making sarcastic remarks who from time to time brought us fresh news from farm headquarters or even from Chengdu. 

Two years had already passed since Mao’s death. Although there was from time to time talk in the newspapers of rehabilitation of political prisoners, but with the iron curtain of Hua Guofeng “Follow Mao’s commands and instructions” in place, the evil people who had made the false charges against the prisoners were still at their posts and hadn’t been criticized in any way. The Chinese Communists blamed all their crimes on a scapegoat — Jiang Qing. 

This made us realize that the old machinery of state cannot negate itself. Reform is very hard in a one party dictatorship! “Political rehabilitation” is even harder. Rapid rehabilitation of the victims of the unjust, falsified and mistaken cases was at odds with the Party’s self image of being “great, brilliant and correct”. 

1.  Getting the News While Cleaning Out a Gully

After twenty years of labor, two big dams had been built at the top of the Second Gully. Tens of kilometers of irrigation ditches circling the mountain were built between the dams and the various brigades downstream. These irrigation ditches brought water from the dams to several hundred mu of paddy fields. The irrigation ditches curved back and forth along the side of the mountain belong the dams as they descended into the fields.  

Mud and gravel washed away by sudden summertime mountain floods rushing off the bald mountains that surrounded the valley would silt up the irrigation ditches so each year before spring planting all the brigades had to assign people to clean out the irrigation ditches that encircled the mountains. 

The jailers and soldiers supervising the laborers set up a temporary sentry post high above the irrigation ditches where it would be easy to watch the ditch cleaning work. 

Each year when the time came to clean the silt from the irrigation ditches, the laborers would be divided up among several dozen stretches of irrigation ditch. Each person was assigned a work quota that they were expected to complete within a few days. 

I happened to have been assigned to clean out a section just beneath the sentry post.  Just as I was cleaning out the silt from the ditch, the words of a conversation between two men suddenly reached me down below. 

“Half the brigade has sent in appeals recently. I heard that Rongshan Tea Factory released one-third of its counter-revolutionary criminals.  All the work that we have been doing for years has been wasted.”  That was the voice of He Qinyun.

When I heard that, I stopped what I was doing so that I didn’t make any noise that might interrupt them. I wanted to learn from their conversation news about the implementation of the rehabilitation policy. So I decided that I might as well stop and listen carefully.

– 487 –

“Didn’t the authorities tell us that arresting people and convicting them was the right thing to do then.  Rehabilitating them today is also the right thing to do. All we can do is just follow the policy. The courts certainly did make a mess of things, sending all those people who shouldn’t have been arrested to our prison where they caused us a lot of trouble.” That was Xu Shikui grumbling. 

“Don’t talk that way. Just take the case of Zhang Xikun as an example. We both prepared material for that case. We spent over six months on interrogations and discussed the case with several dozen people in the Discipline and Education Department. The day before yesterday someone from the Xichang Intermediate Court said that we must re-investigate that case”  said He Qingyun.

“Yes.  If two years ago we had let that case drag on without doing anything, some people would have given us trouble by calling us revisionists. Anyone who opposed shooting Zhang Xikun would have been at the very least charged with sympathizing with counter-revolution. Now, less than three years later, if we were to re-open the case, it would be a mistaken case. But if we don’t do anything, people will say that we are opposing policy and opposing the Party Center. Old Kang is an example. He was fired and then set away for reflection. I really don’t understand what the “battle between the two lines” means” said Xu Shikui, clearly feeling puzzled and conflicted.

“The one to blame is Mr. Brilliant and Wise himself, Lin Chegao.  Ever since he got to the Sixth Brigade he said day after day that the counter-revolutionaries in the Sixth Brigade want to overthrow the government and treat us everyday like we are a bunch of rightists. Things are better now. He grabbed onto the tail of the old ways and left with them. He left us a mess to clean up.”  He Qingyun had never gotten along with Lin Chegao. Now that Lin Chegao was down on his luck, he naturally would not miss a chance to say things at his expense. 

“I am ready. Once all the Sixth Brigade is released, we’ll all be headed home to till our fields.”  Old Xu had planned ahead. These past few years, while Xu Shikui had been the king of the Sixth Brigade mountain, his wife and children had been living in comfort. 

He fully realized that his family was a parasite on the body of the two hundred members of the Sixth Brigade. If there were no prisoners, his family would have to move. 

He Qingyun was a bit more optimistic: “That is the way the struggle between political lines goes. Chairman Mao said so himself. Anything is possible once revisionism rears its head in China……” He stopped. He knew that he couldn’t say anything more or else he would be seen as “opposed to the Communist Party”. 

“Li Peilian was not only politically rehabilitated, he became an official as well.  We have both written in his file. If he were on our farm and pasture land he would not be easy to get along with!” Old Xu had touched on the specific problem.  So the idea came to him “Leaving is the wisest strategy.”

I held my breath and concentrated intently on listening. Those were perhaps the most precious words that I had heard in twenty years. Hearing honest words was very moving deep in the heart of persecuted people. For over twenty years, we had gotten used to hearing their lies.  Opportunities to hear what they really thought were rare. 

I raised my head to look towards the sentry post. I only saw Xu Shikui and He Qingyun sitting there looking straight ahead next to two soldiers. The soldiers were quite naive. During the “Support the Left” “支左” campaign, all they knew how to do was to hit people with carrying poles. All they knew was to follow orders and tie people up.  During the “Support the Left” they would scream and hit people. They were all peasants. During Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, they had to eat wild plants or so-called Guanyin dirt to alleviate their hunger. 

They were proud to have become soldiers. Now they got enough to eat and were happy to be used as cannon fodder. They wouldn’t spare a thought for anything beyond their personal lives. The dictatorship of the proletariat could not have gotten anywhere without these brainless “guns” or without “sharpshooters” like Xu Shiku and He Qingyun. 

2.  News of Gao Desheng’s Death

Just after we finished cleaning the irrigation ditches, Guo Chuanxiao was transferred back to the Sixth Brigade to take the place of the Old Man Rong who had been there for many years. 

The third evening after Guo Chanxiao was transferred back,  he called me to the brigade office. He waited until I was seated on the small stool and then asked me in a low voice, “Do you know what happened to Secretary Gao Desheng?” Very surprised at the questions, I shook my head. 

He stopped for a moment and then said, “He died a horrible death. The Rebel Faction put him through a struggle session. They broke all the ribs on the left side of his chest and then locked him in a grain threshing room near the town of Luomabao. They didn’t give him any medical care. His broken ribs cut through his flesh, he wounds got infected and he died.”

He screamed for several days as he lay there dying. It was heart rending. Nobody could stand listening to him. His family was not allowed to visit him. They said that he wouldn’t admit to his crimes so even death could not wipe away his crimes. 

– 488 –

He even said, “At the start of the Cultural Revolution, when the Rebel Faction was struggling Secretary Gao, one of the charges against Gao was that he was protecting you and Chen Li.”

Everyone knows about those many years of Communist brutality. The Legalist philosophers of ancient China advocated harsh punishments and strict implementation of the law.  Mao imitated Shang Yang, the harsh lawmaker of the State of Qin and the Qin Prime Minister Li Si. Both of them over 2000 years ago won for themselves the reputation of tyrants very tough on people they could not simply order around. 

After Guo Chuanxiao finished speaking, I bowed my head and couldn’t speak for a moment. I made a quick calculation — Chen Shi had been dead for nearly a year. Having said that, Guo Chuanxiao looked towards me and added:

“The Discipline and Education Department twice applied for permission to execute Chen Li and you. But Secretary Gao said, “Those two have a student background and so can be saved through education. The Communist Party stresses transforming people and not physically destroying them.  Moreover,  those two have a great influence on the other prisoners. Once we succeed in reforming them, they will bring along with them many of the other prisoners. That will be greatly to the advantage of our work of ideological transformation and educational work.”

This attitude of Gao Desheng certainly saved me from the death penalty. Gao Desheng’s strong protection seems to have played a large part in my survival.

I had heard earlier various rumors about Gao Desheng. The last time that the Sixth Brigade vegetable group and I met him was in Winter 1966, after the start of the Cultural Revolution, he was wearing cloth shoes and looked very pale. I remember how at the meeting, he asked me how I had been doing and said several things about how I should “understand my prospects clearly” and then hurried off. 

After that, Gao Desheng and Li Peilian were never seen again on the Second Ravine. What Guo Chuanxiao told me that day was the first time I had heard it. 

I had long heard that the farm had asked permission to execute me but I didn’t know how I could have escaped execution twice. Thinking back to thirteen years before my hunger strike at the Third Infrastructure Brigade,  I now realized that my calmness and righteousness during my first frank exchange of views with Gao Desheng just before PRC National Day in 1964 must have moved him deeply. 

That made me believe that the Chinese Communist Party is not the monolithic bloc that they boast about. Just the contrary, just because they do not enjoy popular support, there are all kinds of weaknesses and divisions within the Party. The inhumane treatment that Gao Desheng suffered was no doubt an imitation of the methods used by the Party leadership against people like Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, and He Long. 

Thinking about that, I asked Guo Chuanxiao, “Are his family members still alive?” “Yes, they live in Luomabao. In recent years they have been struggled against terribly because of Gao Desheng.”  This conversation brought us closer together. We fell silent. In my heart I prayed for the lost souls. After five minutes, I raised my head and said to Guo Chuanxiao, “I think that I should write a letter mourning Secretary Gao’s death to express my regrets about his death and ask you to give it to his family.” Guo nodded in agreement. 

I didn’t have any sympathy for Gao Desheng’s joining and supporting the Communist Party but I still thought that he was of all the Communist Party members in the brigade, the one who had lost the least of his humanity thereby. 

In a complex society it cannot be surprising that someone mistakenly enters a certain political organization and comes to believe a false faith. People who are confused by a false faith are not the same as the leaders of an evil cult. Just the contrary, we should believe that all human hearts are made of flesh and blood. Even though they go astray for a time and do evil things, they might one day become suddenly enlightened and help us. We should see that kind of person as our friend. 

– 489 –

Guo Chuanxiao and I talked deep into the night. He asked me if I had received any letters from my mother recently and asked about her health and her current circumstances. I told him that my mother was no longer considered a rightist and was working hard to get me “politically rehabilitated”. 

I asked him some questions about policies on political rehabilitation. Finally, Guo Chuanxiao announced that from the next day onwards, I would be transferred to the odd jobs group. 

The odd jobs group was a mixed group that included the carpenters, metalworkers, animal livestock workers, and repair workers of the Sixth Brigade. My job was to go along with the Sixth Brigade tractor as it did its plowing and help them with plowing and tractor maintenance. That way I would have freedom of movement and wouldn’t need to report for group roll call, or to go out and return with the group. I would only need to return to the Sixth Brigade dormitory in the evening. 

The next day, I went with the Sixth Brigade plowing tractor.  I sat in the back raising and lowering the plow plate. We stripped the mountain ridges of vegetation. The earth overturned by the plow and the tractor treads stirred up a “thick mist” of red dust which, after it was caught by the fierce northwest wind, coated the plow. 

Sitting atop the tractor, I couldn’t see which way we were going and found it hard to breathe. It took only a half hour for me to become a dustman covered by a coat of red dust from head to foot. My head and back looked as if they had been painted by the dust. 

Fortunately, I had a shaved head and so washing my face and head was no problem. The only problem was that I inhaled a great deal of dust into my lungs. All my seven bodily orifices got jammed with dust. This had a very bad effect on my health. 

In the words of Li Jin, “Is this a job for a human being?” I was happy to have that job however since although plowing was very hard, the job gave me freedom of movement that I never had before. 

From then onwards, I never had to stand in line for roll call, report our numbers and go off to work or even report when I needed to go to urinate. That ended not only many inconveniences but also put an end to living on tenterhooks for fear of being cursed and beaten at any moment. 

– 490 

3. “Freedom” in Prison

After I transferred to the odd jobs group, I could go freely in and out of my prison cell. I could even go to the farm headquarters library for the dependents of farm workers where I could read bound back issues of “Reference News“. Earlier I could sometimes pull a copy out of the trash. It was like finding hidden treasure since even though “Reference News” was an internal publication that had been carefully filtered by the Chinese Communists, it did sometimes have some new information that was better than what one could read in the People’s Daily which was packed wall-to-wall with lies. 

I could also make plans to go visit friends in other brigades and get from them about news and policies that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard. I could go in the evening to any brigade headquarters to see an outdoor movie, visit local people in their homes, buy rice and meat and not worry about Xu Shikui rushing out to attack me suddenly from behind some door. 

I could go visit peasant homes to understand how they were living, make friends with them, and hear news about “political rehabilitation” and related policies. I could go anywhere as long as I was back in my dormitory to sleep by 11 PM. For the time being, I would think of that kind of life as “freedom”. 

Freedom is beyond price. This miscarriage of justice had cost me over twenty years of my life!  After many long months and years, I had finally gotten this much “freedom” although at the price of taking the tough job of handling the plow on the back of the tractor. 

The first few days I returned from farm headquarters, the smell and the stirring fragrance of ripening apples moved me so that what I really wanted was to become a cricket living under the apple trees.  I didn’t want to return to the dark and gloomy prison. It is no wonder that the philosophers said, “Life is precious, love is even greater, but both can be forsaken for the sake of freedom.”  [ Hungarian patriot Sándor Petőfi quote;   生命诚可贵，爱 情价更高，若为自由故，二者皆可抛。]

Guo Chuanxiao’s wife Liao was a farm headquarters stockroom worker.  Liao — everyone called her Teacher Liao — had worried about us for years.  

In order to avoid suspicion, she had kept up the appearance of keeping strictly apart from us and had made sure to appear cold when she encountered us. Whenever an exile was punished however, she would work through her husband to make sure that the people involved in the case would let up on us. That itself was exceedingly rare in our harsh prison environment. 

Ever since I was transferred to the odd jobs group, I was sometimes allowed to eat at the cadres’ cafeteria and so often saw Teacher Liao. One day she came across me outside the basketball court and insisted that I go to her home for lunch. I felt that I couldn’t decline. Going to the farm director’s home as a guest would have been a first in all my twenty-odd years in prison however so I felt ill at ease. 

The table had already been set when I entered the room. Guo Chuanxiao got a bottle of wine from the kitchen and filled the wine glass in front of me. So as not to upset him, I only sipped the wine slowly. He gossiped a bit and then, surprising, started talking about his two children. His daughter, a middle school graduate, was getting ready to take the examination for a teacher training school. His son had graduated from primary school and was getting ready to take the high school entrance examination. The two children at the school for the farm children got only mediocre grades. He hoped that I would tutor his children so that they would succeed in the examinations for their school. 

I paused and then answered in a low voice, “I had to leave my studies behind over twenty years ago. I got good marks in middle school but after all these years I must have forgotten a lot. I would need to first study the current course materials for primary and middle school students. After that I could tutor them. I would also need permission from the odd jobs group leader Peng Wenxue.”

When he heard this, Guo Chuanxiao went to a room deeper in the house and came back with three books. They were the printed teaching materials for the Chinese, Mathematics and Political courses that his daughter was studying. As he handed them to me, he said “Tutoring will be every afternoon. As for the odd jobs group, I have a word with Peng Wenxue right away.”

That is how I became the tutor of the farm leader’s daughter. Every afternoon I came to Guo Chuanxiao’s home on time. My preliminary impression was that Guo Chanxiao’s classwork was at the level of a primary school student. His son couldn’t do basic arithmetic. That was the great achievement of the Cultural Revolution.

– 491 –

Fortunately Teacher Liao was usually strict with the children so they weren’t in very bad shape. Under my tutelage, the students made rapid progress but I wasn’t sure that in such a short time that they would be ready for their school entrance examinations!  I found additional materials to supplement their course work among the review materials for the school entrance examinations in the library for the farm children. 

When I left farm headquarters, I thought about what it had looked like in the old days as I walked along. I gradually realized that the Third Infrastructure Brigade had been there. 

Fifteen years before, when I had been taken under armed escort to Erdaogou it had been midwinter. There had only been a long winding drainage ditch in front of the several rows of brick buildings on the farm then.

The water in the ditch had been dark and slimy like a city sewer ditch. The dry winter wind had robbed the red earth of all its moisture. There in the ditch was the only place where some “dark water” remained. 

Over the ten-odd years since then, the subsurface water from the various reservoirs had joined to create a twenty meter wide brook. The prison slaves had planted trees on both sides of the brook so after a few years it became a green corridor. 

When the green corridor was made, I built many crude work sheds next to the Third Infrastructure Brigade. These became the main housing area for the farm employees. The masters of the residential area built a stone road in front of the work sheds to create a “side street”. A school building for the farm children had been built in the middle of the apple orchard that surrounded farm headquarters. 

The orchard enclosing wall separated the work sheds from the orchards. That had been many years ago. Now I was making a trip back to the old place. The library and reading room were in the far end of the school. When I entered the passageway, I ran into the recently arrived Wei Pengwan. He had been a middle school teacher in the Zhaotong region. He was a quiet solitary person who rarely talked with other people. He was short, near-sighted and about forty years old. He looked very old.

He had often failed to complete his work quota when he had been at the Sixth Brigade. During the farming busy season, he had often been one of those “doing night combat in the fields” to complete his work quota. Fortunately he was stoic and could put up with adversity. Fifteen years of forced labor had worn him down as he quietly accepted insult after insult. I had never seen him confront cadres or guards. 

After the school for the farm children was moved here, Wei Pengwan got an order from the farm personnel department to go to the school to become a Chinese literature teacher. The day he got that order he couldn’t believe his eyes. His salary jumped from 20 RMB per month to 35 RMB per month. He probably got that stroke of good fortune because, always having been obedient no matter what, farm headquarters thought well of him. The most important reason however was that qualified school teachers were rare. 

The face that several years before had been ashen pale had become rosy red. It could be said that he was a “completely different person” since he had worn that sad depressed face all day long at the Sixth Brigade. After we shook hands, Wei Pengwan invited me to his office for a chat. There I learned that this school for the children of farm employees has been moved here from Luomabao. During the Cultural Revolution, the teachers had all disappeared.  Some had fled, others got sick and still others died. Although these teachers all had family or other friendly ties to the local prosecutors, they couldn’t escape the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. 

Even people like Li Peilian, the famous expert on Marxism-Leninism, could not escape prison. When even someone who had come up from an impoverished family background like Gao Desheng could be beaten to death under the clubs of the Rebel Faction, who could teachers ever be able to protect themselves?

4. The Farm Employee Residential Shed District

Looking down from the school building,  just one wall away, was the farm employee residential shed district.  Beneath our windows were shed roofs nailed together bits of broken asbestos tiles, pieces of oxhair carpet and pieces of wood. 

The sight of those worn roofs made me think back to the mountainside slums of Chongqing that faced towards the docks during the War of Resistance Against Japan. I thought too of how in the movie “The Spring River Flows East” the actress Shuzhen had dragged an old person and a child along with her as she sang “The moonlight shines down on rich and poor alike.” The prison slaves who lived here could no longer sing that kind of song. 

The young men who had been imprisoned there for ten-odd years of their youth had aged. They burned out the last embers of their lives here. All men are thrall to the seven emotions — joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate and lust — and the six senses. They wanted to find a wife and settle down and have a family. Yet how could a released prisoner who earned only 20 RMB per month find a woman willing to endure the “chill of his cave dwelling” with him?  The farm employees made fun to their own solitary lives saying, “One person eats their fill and the whole family never goes hungry.”

– 492 –

The handsome hard working young people among the farm employees would not feel attracted to anyone here, even family members of farm headquarters cadres. Very few normal young women would be willing to marry and live in one of those dovecote-like shacks. 

Nonetheless, the number of women in those dovecote-shacks increased year after year. Some of these women may have fallen into one of the “Five Black Categories” or perhaps beggar women so poor that they would marry for the sake of a few pounds of food coupons. Others may have not been good looking, have physiological defects or discarded women marrying for a second time. 

The topic of my conversation with Wei Pengwan soon turned to the topic of the “residents” of those dovecote shacks. Among the residents were people both good and bad and of radically different ranks. There were many scumbags like Cheng Xianshi amongst them but there were also honest and good natured people like Wang Dabing. 

The moral character of the women varied considerably. Some were simple and naive mountain girls. Some were used to selling themselves and as freelance prostitutes good at evaluating other people. Some “big sisters” would sleep with a man for a night for the sake of several jin of ration coupons while others couldn’t stand the humiliations they were suffering and so killed themselves. 

The twin plagues of poverty and illness devastated public morality during the Cultural Revolution. Every day there were rumors of the fighting, swindling and violent struggles between rival suitors in those dovecote shacks. Real-life tragedies played out every day on those lawns.

I knew that Wang Dabing had remained on the farm headquarters’ pig raising operation to feed pigs after he completed his sentence. Several times he had people bring me a note inviting me over for a chat. After I transferred to the odd jobs group, I heard that he had met a young village woman from his hometown of Changshou and that they were planning to marry at Spring Festival 1979. 

For years Wang Dabing had been very kind and helped me a lot. He had made a deep impression on me. When I heard that he was going to get married, I decided to make time to visit and congratulate him. I took the change I had been saving the past two years, went into the Yanyuan county seat and bought them a woolen blanket for their bed as my wedding gift to them.

On the last day of Spring Festival 1979 I picked my way along the small path that ran along the embankment. His “new house” had been the vegetable shed of the First Agricultural Brigade.  The shed had been renovated. The mud wall was whitewashed, a new door installed and glass installed in the only window. 

At the front of their small room was a thirty square meter mortar surface that had been swept clean. I was afraid that the hot summer sun shining on the woolen blanket would make the room feel steaming hot. For someone who had been released from prison however, it looked like an ideal place to live that must have been hard to get. 

I walked up to the door and knocked. The door opened and a twenty-some year old young woman came to greet me. She was wearing an orchid covered old cotton padded jacket. 

Although it was patched in places, it had been washed very clean. She wore a pair of new red cloth shoes. A black braid of hair hung behind her thin frame. She had a shy, oval shaped face. She had a scar on her left eye which was clearly a bit smaller than her right eye. She saw that a guest had come so she politely invited the guest inside. 

Wang Dabing was busy in the kitchen when I came in. When he saw me, he got up and gave me a warm welcome. I looked around this 15 square meter mud walled “new house” with a just-installed mortar floor, a wooden bed on the left with two big red bed covers on it. Above the wooden bed frame at the head of the bed hung a homemade wooden box. The room was very neat. Even the sunflowers beside the stove were neatly arranged. 

The big red character joy hung on the wall above the bed. Above the head of the bed hung a red drawing of twin children. The hostess said that her family had bought it back home in Changshou County and brought it here to express the traditional wish that the newly married couple would soon have children. 

I put the present I had brought onto the wooden box and sat on the wooden bench at the round table on the wooden bench that Wang Dabing had handed to me. Our conversation naturally turned to our hostess.

– 493 –

She came from the White Crane Commune in Changshou County. Her parents were both dead. Her two brothers were local peasants. I would have expected that she would talk about the local conditions and customs of her home village and how their marriage came to be, including their match-maker. But instead she talked animatedly about the harvest of her family and didn’t seem to have the reserve one might have expected upon first meeting. 

She said she had a family of four. In 1978 they were allocated 450 jin of yellow grain, four hundred jin of corn, and 800 jin of sweet potatoes (which counted as the equivalent of 200 jin of grain).  Their harvest of crops like lima beans, wheat, and garden peas came to the equivalent of 150 jin of grain. Their family of four had to share a ration of 1100 jin in all. Each person got a ration of less than 300 jin. 

Since all family sideline production activities had been “cut off” as a tail of capitalism, non-staple foodstuffs were in very short supply. Their food rations were enough to fill their bellies for only half the year. They need cloth coupons to buy clothing. A family of four each year shared four coupons for 3 1/3 square meters of cloth each. They could get the coupons only if they fulfilled the state assigned cotton requisition quota. The vegetable oil ration coupons for a family of four were enough to give each person only one jin of vegetable oil for the entire year. Moreover, they only got the vegetable oil if they had fulfilled their state assigned rapeseed production quota. They never ate pork except at the Spring Festival. They didn’t put vegetable oil on their food. She spoke of these things she knew well without any reserve.

Although I already knew about this kind of thing, hearing her describe it in such great detail astounded me. This once again proved that China’s peasants mired in starvation and misery. That was probably why she was willing to marry in far distant Yanyuan, to spend her days with a released prisoner more than twenty years senior to her.

She told me innocently that although she was already 22 years old she had only very rarely heard the quacking of a duck or the bark of a dog. After she mentioned that, she told the story of her sister-in-law who had raised chickens. 

My sister-in-law, who was younger than I am, was pregnant and so according to village custom, several old hens would be slaughtered to feed her as she recovered during the first month after her child was born. There were no chickens in the entire production brigade however. She got from I don’t know where several small chicks to feed and was afraid that the production brigade would find out so she put the chickens in the wooden box and put the box away on the roof of the pigpen where she fed them. But since they were  cooped up in the pigpen she would have to find food to feed them. They had planted sweet potatoes in the small plot of land allocated to them for their personal needs. She had only managed to get the chickens up to half a jin or so when the uncle of the commune party secretary discovered them. He claimed that this was the tail of capitalism and so forced young sister-in-law to kill the small chicks and smash the chicken coop. 

There was nothing she could do. She was forced to kill all five chicks. She couldn’t bear to eat them however. She smoked them and hung them up in the rafters of her house thinking that the children would eat them later. She hadn’t thought of the rats and the weasel which soon ate them up. Young sister-in-law cried about that for a while.”

In those days, when it got to the latter half of the year, the peasants would ask the commune to borrow against the next year’s grain so that they could have some food to get through the famine. The commune then became a creditor pressing down on the local peasants and the peasants became debtors to the commune. The “state” was in fact constituted by party secretaries big and small.  In that strange slave society, the peasants became the slaves of the commune so how could they be masters of their own affairs?

When I left Wang Dabing’s home it was already midnight. He accompanied me to the little path covered with bits of charcoal. In the bitter cold winter night the wind had already died down. A refreshing fragrant breeze blew from the apple orchard. The pitch black forest alongside the river seemed to hide a dark menace that might pounce at any moment. 

Over the past few years, many recently released Cultural Revolution-era rogues accustomed to vandalism and looting had been bringing their perverted Cultural Revolution lifestyles into the impoverished community of the dovecote-like sheds. Someone walking alone late at night through that thick forest might often be robbed by a masked “hero”.

– 494 –

The exiles were utterly destitute. None of us offered fat pickings. However when a “masked man” suddenly leaped out and pointed a spear at them, they would as their victim took from their pockets all the coins they had, they would then take the “Mountain Fortress” brand wrist watch off their wrists. That happened so often that the employees got together and went to the Discipline and Education office to complain, saying that they hoped that the “government” would take measures against it.

One would think that such a rapacious government would not tolerate thievery.  Yet thievery was commonplace and they never caught any. Therefore people rarely went out alone to walk on the path along a densely forested strip of land. If they had to go that way, they dared only go with two or more companions. 

Later, after I returned to Chongqing, I realized even more acutely how the “political prisoners” are in the crosshairs of the authorities. They were incompetent when it came to criminal offenders. They ignored ordinary criminality and so public order was hard to maintain.  People who dared to openly block the road and rob people at gunpoint but they wouldn’t dare to oppose the dictatorship or stand up for justice.

Wang Dabing held a flashlight while I carried a club. Just as I passed the road that runs along the line between the vegetable group and the Third Agricultural Brigade, I suddenly heard groans coming from nearby and then a flurry of footsteps. I stopped, alert. Wang Dabing turned on his flashlight and pointed it in the direction the sound had come from while I unconsciously gripped the club more tightly. 

We could see just twenty meters away two shadows close together, stumbling towards us. The smell of cheap liquor swept over us. 

When we looked more closely, we saw that it was a man and a woman. The woman seemed quite sober. She was slapping that dead drunk man hard. The man kept saying drunken nonsense. When we saw that, we relaxed. 

Wang Dabing said that the woman’s name was Yinzhi and that she was the most famous person in the dovecote shacks. People said that she was from Mianyang. Poverty had forced her to become a “Big Sister Wang”.  She had been confined for two years of “re-education through labor” in her home locality. After she was released, a young man in the Third Infrastructure Brigade had brought her here to start a family. Shortly thereafter, the young man died of illness. Yinzhi went back to her old profession and was pursued by many men in the dovecote shack district. 

Fat with a freckled face with a big flattened nose that seemed like it was pasted on her face, a pair of garden pea size eyes, she looked like a cartoon character drawn by Hua Junwu. She was however in her early twenties and although she didn’t have a pretty face she was well-proportioned and sexy, took care in how she dressed, and good at flirting. After her man died, she took up with more of the men in her neighborhood. 

Men often fought over her affections. She became a common topic of banter in the dovecote shacks and of the “news” relayed amongst the people in the nearby brigades. Many people gossiped about her behind her back but many others spoke well of her. Yinzhi didn’t really have a hard time. She could have an affair with any man she pleased. 

When she saw us two standing there, she yelled to us, “Come help and send him home.” We walked over and picked up the fallen drunk. 

Yinzhi held Wang Dabing’s flashlight to show us the way. We supported the drunk as he staggered along back to the group dormitory of the farm headquarters vegetable group. 

Once we had delivered the drink, we again got on the road towards the Sixth Agricultural Brigade. I thought that the dovecote shacks are not a place for an honest couple like Wang Dabing and his wife to live. I told him that once they got married, they should quickly find a way to move back to their hometown of Changshou.

In May of that year, Wang Dabing’s application to return to his original household registration of Changshou was approved. He quickly did the paperwork to leave the farm and went back to his old home village to become a peasant. 

– 495 –

That day, he got a horse-drawn carriage, put his young wife and luggage on it, and left that devil’s den that had worn away twenty years of his youth. The land he was heading to was certainly no “paradise” however. 

5. Another Meeting with Li Peilian

One day Ma Dapao stood on the mound in the Sixth Brigade courtyard yelling in a loud voice “Li Peilian has been released from prison. Yesterday his wife came in a jeep sent by farm headquarters to Luomabao to get him.  Soon the headquarters will hold a rehabilitation meeting for him.”  That was a “little broadcast” that Ma Dapao was purposely aiming at us. I had heard before that Li Peilian had been singled out as a “black-hearted leader” of the capitalist roaders.  Later I heard that he had been sent to a “Mao Zedong Thought Study Class”. 

Ten years had passed in a flash. Ten years earlier when I had heard him tell the story of Yang Xiu was still fresh in my memory. I could never have guessed that even such an overcautious leading talent of the Communist Party would not be able to escape being thrown into prison. 

When Lin Chegao took power, Li Peilian was sent to prison.  When Lin Chegao went crazy, Li Peilian got his old job back. Why was this? The prison guards felt confused. When did the iron clubs of Mao Zedong realize that all this was just a “class struggle” game?

For decades, China under the rule of the Chinese Communists, had been stuck in a vicious cycle of “contradicting the contradictions” that played out farce after farce of self-deceptions. 

The Communists seemed to think that only by murdering people could they highlight the imposing despotic power of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Ever since the start of the “Cultural Revolution” it had become customary after every National Day celebration to hold a large meeting to announce verdicts and to murder people. At the climax of the “Cultural Revolution” a large number of people, at least ten or twenty, were murdered at these meetings. 

The Chinese Communists said that if they didn’t do this, the poor and middle peasants would return to the evil customs of the old society and tens of millions of people would die as a result. [??] The result was that during Mao Zedong’s rule, famine spread throughout the entire country. Everyone felt insecure and the people had no livelihood. 

Just before the start of October 1978, Yanyuan canceled that year’s “Public Rally to Announce Verdicts“. The various companies under 909 were allowed to dispense with the big search of our quarters under the pretext of a “health inspection” that in previous years had often been used to beat up and terrorize “counter-revolutionaries”. The tension that had built up over the years in the Sixth Brigade relaxed. The prison slaves of the Sixth Brigade still had their doubts. They feared this could be the start of the next “open plot”.  

During the “National Day” celebrations that year, films were projected for two nights on the big embankment of the First Agricultural Brigade but these were not like films of the model theater of the Cultural Revolution shown before. These were new films. The first evening the film “Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty” starring Bao Guoan was shown. The second evening a film that had been frequently criticized as noxious weeds harmful to socialism, ‘The Peach Blossom Fan’ was shown. 

– 496 –

How many famous literary people had been killed during the Cultural Revolution accused of “using the past to disparage the present”?  Although they had said not long ago that entertainers under Nationalist Party rule had been simply playthings, after those playthings were “liberated”, many terrible things happened to them when they worked on the Communist Party controlled stage. There they weren’t even playthings. They became a group of slaves for whom even death could not atone for their crimes. 

Mao Zedong only allowed them to parrot his songs of praise and shout “long live” in the traditional salute to the emperor. How could these people ever manage to frequently use the past to disparage the present, spread vicious assertions, and attack the Three Red Banners and the socialist system? Mao Zedong arbitrarily asserted that those people hated the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and so ordered that they must be wiped out by being “reformed”.  Therefore during the “Cultural Revolution” many literary figures were the victims of persecution and looting of their homes. Many drowned themselves in the river. Traditional opera disappeared and the performers laid low. 

Seeing traditional opera on the silver screen made for a pleasant change of atmosphere. Even though “Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty ” was a western-style drama, completely absent were shouts of “Long live Chairman Mao” often heard in revolutionary operas. 

The evening of the film “Sui Emperor Yang”, I met Li Peilian and his wife for the first time in eleven years at the First Agricultural Brigade’s outdoor film showing.

After supper that evening at 7:30, I went with the entire brigade over to the First Brigade. When our brigade had just entered the big gate in the embankment enclosing wall, I saw Zhou Liping sitting on the grass outside the wall.

In 1965, at the request of Gao Desheng, LI Peilian had transferred to the Sixth Agricultural Brigade to create a test site for “rehabilitation by persuasion” of political prisoners serving long sentences. Chen Li and I were the “guinea pigs” of that experimental site. 

I heard in late 1967 that Li Peilian was found to be a supporter of the “May 16th” counter-revolutionaries whom Mao Zedong had condemned in his May 16, 1966 People’s Daily article. Soon he was sent to a Mao Zedong Thought Study Class and moved to one of the “cowsheds” where counter-revolutionaries were held during the Cultural Revolution. 

That year the Revolutionary Committee had ordered Zhou Liping to divorce Li Leilian but she flatly refused. Then she was treated like Jin Mei. She was relieved of her official post and took her daughter with her to Beidao where they depended on each other’s support to survive ten years of torment. 

I never imagined that I would meet her by chance that day. She waved once she saw me. Seeing her for the first time in eleven years made plain the deep wrinkles that eleven years of torments had written into her face. Her hair was also cut very short. In the dim moonlight I could see that Zhou Liping’s hair had already turned white. She looked like an old woman on the far side of fifty. 

When I approached her, just as I was about to ask what had become of Li Peilian, Zhou Liping stretched out her hand to me. For twenty years, an unbridgeable gap had yawned between me and the discipline and education personnel. 

The discipline and education personnel saw us as worthless people who could be casually insulted. In our eyes, they were a band of savage beasts devoid of all humanity. Our relations were between slaves and the enslaved. In addition to the coldness and enmity between us, we alway had to be alert and cautious. 

I remember one study meeting in 1966 in which Li Peilian had said, “The only difference between us is one of understanding. We will use our ideas to change your ideas. Therefore, we should not go from there to see differences in rank and boundary lines.” That statement ran totally contrary to everything that Mao Zedong had said. Was that his own wishful thinking or was it just a trick? Who could tell what he really thought deep inside?

The “Cultural Revolution” had brought Li Peilian and his wife over to our side of the gap that had once divided us. Then, looking back at that gap that they had just crossed, I realized even more clearly that this was only a pitfall that Mao Zedong had created in the relations of people with one another.  If he had not done so, then why would there be this fighting and killing of one another?

Zhou Liping turned around and waved towards the road. I followed the direction of her hand and saw about fifteen meters away from me a man wearing a gray gown walking towards me out of the darkness. That man eleven years before had been the gifted scholar of the farm headquarters Discipline and Education Department. Everyone then had thought that he had more theoretical knowledge than anyone else on the farm. 

I studied him in the twilight. Now he looked totally different from the casual and elegant man of eleven years before. His face had become aged and dignified. His cheekbones were prominent and he had deep wrinkles in his forehead and at his temples where his white hair fluttered in the breeze. The self-confidence and talent he had had eleven years ago had completely vanished. It had been replaced by depression and despair. The patched long gown he wore, in particular, made him look like a different person from the one who had looked so handsome and debonair in his western-style windbreaker. 

– 497 –

During that decade, Li Peilian had lost his western manner and gone back to wearing the costume of Old China. He looked like he had often been beaten, tortured and persecuted during those eleven years in prison. No matter whether they were government and party cadres sent down for labor reform at the May Seventh Cadre Schools during the Cultural Revolution or locked up with other counter-revolutionaries in a cowshed, or simply locked up for personal reflection, prison was prison. It wore away his sense of being in the vanguard and his “dignity” and washed away the Communist faith which he had once observed so scrupulously. 

He had in fact been held captive for a decade. He had finally reached the point of what he had said, “The only difference between you and me is in our understanding.” His good and kind wife and daughter had also suffered, because of their connection to him, during those years that were unbearable to even think about. 

Had his own experience taught Li Peilian the true nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat? The story of Yang Xiu cannot be used to avoid that question. 

Twenty years before, Li Peilian had just graduated from the Law Department of Zhongguo Renmin University and became one of the rare first judges of “New China”. At that time before even taking his place in a courtroom, he had been assigned to the Marxism-Leninism Study Office at the Ya’an Agricultural College. 

During the Anti-Rightist Campaign the following year, Li Peilian was a butcher who encircled and suppressed the “Rightists” there. He took part in fabricating the Ya’an Agricultural College counter-revolutionary plot that had shocked the entire nation at the time. He got over a hundred childish, ignorant students condemned and some naive old professors imprisoned as counter-revolutionaries. Many of them died, condemned unjustly on trumped-up charges. 

After that tidal wave passed came the Great Leap Forward. As Mao sang his triumphant song “Let’s rush forward to Communism!”, all of Mainland China was swept with a great famine of unprecedented proportions. This may have caused Li Peilian, as an educated person confronted with this disaster, to reassess his old beliefs. His awakening may have begun then. 

Soon thereafter he was transferred from his school to the Yanyuan Farm. He soon became Gao Desheng’s right-hand man. After reading the files of people like Chen Li and myself, he began in 1965 to promote the idea of education “through persuasion” for those in the Sixth Brigade who were “most stubbornly” resisting their remolding into new people. This idea may have arisen from regrets about his crimes at the Ya’an Agricultural College or a desire to make up for them.  

It took a lot of courage, in the dangerous political atmosphere of those times, for Li Peilian to dare tell me the story of the death of Yang Xiu. There were many people like him inside the Communist Party in those days. The most representative figure was one of the Vice Mayors of Beijing Municipality at that time, Wu Han. In 1958, Wu Han was one of the first to attack the rightists. Wu Han was the one who fabricated the supposed Zhang-Luo Alliance in which Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji were the co-conspirators. Who would have guessed that eight years later, Wu Han himself would be the first blood sacrifice to the Cultural Revolution for writing the historical play “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office“!

I’m afraid that the Li Peilian standing in front of me had already tasted great sorrow, now finds it too great to put into words”. He certainly must still remember telling me the story of Yang Xiu. For years he had been determined to play it safe. Nonetheless he still could not escape the same misfortune of being imprisoned. This shows that being conciliatory and submissive to a dictator will not win you any sympathy from the dictator.  

Li Peilian came over to me and stretched out his hand. Our sufferings over the past decade had broken through the barrier between us.  As I shook his hand I felt that it was very rough.  It felt like his hand was covered by a thick layer of calluses. 

I remembered the events of eleven years before as if they were yesterday. I remembered our heated arguments and the direct statements I made heedless of the consequences. They must have shaken him. If they had not, he would not have told me the story of Yang Xiu to hint that I needed to learn how to protect myself. 

After we exchanged greetings we didn’t know what to say. Both minds were so crowded with thoughts of what we wanted to say that it was hard to get anything out at all. Just then, the movie started.  The three of us took a long bench from among the ranks of the employees and found a place for ourselves behind the farm employees and the prisoners.  We watched quietly the images moving across the silver screen. 

– 498 –

Several hundred Chinese emperors have come and gone through the long stretch of Chinese history. Only the names of the tyrants are passed down amongst the people for generations. The first is the Founding Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, the second is Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty. 

Emperor Yang ascended to the throne in the year 604 of the Christian Era. He squandered all the wealth and manpower that Emperor Wen had accumulated. He renovated the palace, dug canals, made dazzling displays of state power, spent vast sums on luxury and satisfaction of his personal lust, and invaded other states. A million people lost their lives to satisfy his pride, his extravagance and his wild ambition to expand his territory. 

The fourteen years of Emperor Yang’s rule impoverished the people of the Yellow River delta. Many lost everything, even their homes. Finally the peasants revolted and a rebel general killed Emperor Yang. 

Li Shimin said that Emperor Yang had “destroyed the rule of virtue and spent the people’s labor on his own luxuries’ ‘. The legendary upright official Wei Zheng said that “Emperor Yang used up everything under heaven for his personal use”.  Emperor Yang ran a regime of unparalleled rapacity in his own country. He extorted wealth from the people, spent lavishly on palace renovations and imperial tours, stubbornly ignored the warnings of loyal ministers, was treacherous and deceitful. He threatened that anyone who came to the palace to remonstrate would either be killed on the spot or killed later. 

The reduction of the people to paupers was reproduced time and again on that silver screen. It brought to mind the destruction that Mao Zedong had wrought on Chinese society and culture. Mao had done far more damage than Emperor Yang had managed to do. 

Li Peilian had a quiet discussion as we watched the film. When we spoke of the literary inquisition that had started in 1957, I could tell from his silences that this was a painful topic for him. Everyone, no matter whether circumstances had left them any choice, feels ashamed to have been another person’s executioner.  

I therefore skirted around that topic and discussed the Cultural Revolution. He was just as reluctant as before to speak about a topic about which he knew so much but I couldn’t help asking follow-up questions. He said, “That was a disaster that wiped out the virtues of traditional Chinese culture and even worse prevented the entry of advanced Western culture and ethics. Preaching that loyalty, filial piety, good faith and righteousness are merely the dregs of feudal society on the one hand and saying that equality, freedom and universal love are the masks of the capitalist class on the other leaves people devoid of any moral scruples, turning that into utterly savage beasts.“

I said that for the past twenty-eight years the so-called socialist implementation of Marxism-Leninism had actually been merely a cover for an ambitious person’s one-man dictatorship. China therefore was now in a classic period of restoration of the old order. He nodded his head in agreement. He pointed to Emperor Yang up on the screen and said, “He is the one to blame.”

From that perspective, people who are looking for a way to save China and rescue its people, after having lived through that experience, would likely no longer believe in communist propaganda.  That is a lesson that vast numbers of people paid for with their lives!

I hope that that understanding will promote future social progress. I asked him what he is doing now. He shook his head, “For the moment I am not doing anything. I am waiting at home for the organization to make arrangements for me.” His tone betrayed his pessimism and gloom. There must be many like him who had joined the Communist Party’s gang of thieves by mistake and now, only after having passed the age of 50, did they realize that the ideals of their youth had turned to ashes!

The film ended.  Li Peilian was still deep in thought. The scenes of the turmoil and chaos of war and of the rebel general Yuwen Huaji plunging his sword into the chest of Emperor Yang were still flashing through my mind. I am sure those scenes made a deep impression on him as well. Could this kind of film that “uses the past to criticize the present” be able to warn its audiences?  The great pains that cultural workers had gone to to make this film can be seen in that question.

We left the embankment and parted. I didn’t run into that couple again until 1979 after my political rehabilitation. People said that he had transferred to another work unit but nobody knew which one. Has he been promoted?  Had he been demoted? I was certain, however, that Li Peilian would have no trouble making a living in whatever Chinese Communist regime took shape in the future but I feared that he would not be able to accomplish his own personal ambitions. 

– 499 –

That was because what the Chinese Communist slave regime wanted was not human talent but slave talent.  What a dictator needs to rule is sycophancy, shamelessness and naked pursuit of personal gain. People who assume responsible roles in society, who have a conscience and moral integrity will sooner or later become the deadly enemies of the Chinese Communist regime. 

6. Political Rehabilitation in a Mountain Ravine

The first wave of political rehabilitations finally surged into the Yanyuan Farm during the second half of 1978, surging through the sewers of 909 surrounded as it was by an impregnable wall. 

For thirty years, there had been thousands of concentration camps like 909. Confined to this “sewer” under armed guard were a great many people serving sentences and released employees. A large proportion of them were “political prisoners”.  Political prisoners comprised one-third of the population of the Yanyuan Farm. 

There must have been several million people throughout China who had been punished, tortured, starved, shot or persecuted to death on trumped up charges.  Very many people killed themselves because they could not bear the mental torments and inhuman treatment they were suffering. 

During the political campaigns, when the authorities announced the verdicts against their victims, they would call whatever they pleased a crime such as “vicious attacks”, “slandering the general line and policies of the Party”, “attempting to overthrow the people’s democratic dictatorship”. Not only was there no legal basis for these verdicts, they also totally ignored legal procedures. Everything was done according to “Party policy” and the ideas of individual law enforcement officers on what was good and bad.

During the rule of Mao Zedong, the great majority of the people locked up for “counter-revolutionary crimes” were falsely imprisoned on trumped up charges. Too many to ever count died in prison because they “refused to admit their guilt”. 

Inside the den of monsters that was the Sixth Brigade, Xu Shikui and He Qingyun had the habit of forcing people to “admit guilt and submit to the law”.  Whenever anyone said publicly that they were innocent or secretly snuck out an appeal to higher authority, once it was discovered it would be thoroughly investigated. In less serious cases, the offender would be subjected to a struggle meeting. In more serious cases, their sentence would be increased or they might even be executed. 

People like Chen Li, Zhang Xikun, and Liu Shunsen were “counter-revolutionary elements” whom the authorities had murdered. Was that anything but brutal murder of people who had stood up against the trumped up charges against them?

During the age of despotism, cursing the emperor or even veiled attacks on the emperor were punished by death. The perfidious hellfire of the Cultural Revolution sealed tight shut the gates against any hope of redress. The counter-revolutionaries who had entered the prison gates could not hope to walk out the prison door into the light cleared of all charges. 

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping, now in power, did not want to tinker with the foundations of Chinese Communist power. He was not even willing to remove the stumbling block to reforms.  Instead he used former officials of every rank to “bring order out of chaos”.  How then could any principle not encounter obstacles?

– 500 –

Rehabilitating the victims of unjustified, falsified and mistaken cases was the first step in Deng Xiaoping’s effort to “bring order out of chaos” “拨乱反正”.  Nonetheless it met all sorts of obstacles from the old government offices. How could they now go against their own principles? Overturning false cases in which personal revenge was involved would be harder than flying up to heaven. 

Political rehabilitation did not occur in a flash of lightning in the purge campaigns of the past. Every level of Chinese Communist officials stubbornly refused to go along using all kinds of tactics hard and soft. People who had been rehabilitated still lived with a stigma. They had to stand in long lines outside offices implementing the rehabilitation policy like beggars praying for alms. 

The Deyang Court sent the first person to arrive in summer of 1978 to rehabilitate members of the Sixth Brigade. They quietly re-examined the case of Deyang Prison Discipline and Education officer Jiang Pingfu. Nobody knew what was going on the day Jiang was released from prison. Everyone thought it was just an ordinary transfer to another company. Then when Cao Jixian, Li Kejia and others were rehabilitated and released from prison people could see that something was starting to happen with the redress of unjust, falsified, and mistaken cases. 

The first people to be rehabilitated were former Communist Party grassroots cadres or people who had fathers or elder brothers in power. When they got the notice to “transfer to another locality”, they returned to their cell and told their fellow sufferers the news of their rehabilitation. That news swept over us like a spring wind, spreading to all of the “criminals detained for counter-revolutionary activities” in the Sixth Brigade. 

For a time, what happened was just what people like He Qingyun had feared the most. People began writing appeals in their hundreds.  Xu Shikui who had been waving a big club telling everyone to “confess your guilt and submit to the law” “认罪 伏法” fell silent.  The jailers who were normally the most vicious had to change their attitude. They used the excuse “we were only carrying out orders’ ‘ “我 们是执行单位” to shield themselves from the accusations of people who had been wrongly accused in their attempts to deny their own responsibility for what had happened. 

Many of the Sixth Brigade men had been arrested in the countryside. They couldn’t write their own appeals and so they would ask me to write it for them. During the six months from the start of June 1978 until the start of 1979, I wrote appeals for over twenty men. After we quit work or on a Sunday, I would set up an old table in the courtyard and write appeals.  

For many years, men living together in prison had been forbidden to discuss their cases with one another. If they did, they might be struggled against at a big struggle meeting. People who had lived together for years never discussed their cases. Only after they asked me to write their appeals did they reveal their secrets to me. This gave me a better understanding of what the Mao Zedong era had been like for people at different levels of society. 

The Sixth Brigade had always been considered a collection of deadly enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The great majority of the people seen as counter-revolutionaries who were imprisoned serving long sentences were actually very simple people who had been wrongly accused. 

In addition to those who had mistakenly violated the taboo against insulting Mao Zedong were peasants driven to revolt by starvation. The unjust cases against these people were very simple.

• Mr. Liao was convicted of damaging an image of Mao Zedong. Mr. Chen was convicted because while helping his work unit write slogans he had written “May Chairman Mao Live Ten Thousand Years” as “Chairman Mao is One Year Old“.
• Another man while slaughtering a pig before the Spring Festival had said “What fortune can I tell from the mao (hair) of the pig?” His enemy had reported those words, claiming that he was indirectly cursing the leader and so was convicted. 
• Mr. Yang was convicted for saying that Lin Biao has traitor written all over his face.
• A Mr. Xiang was convicted of slandering the People’s Militia after he discovered his wife commiting adultery with the commander of a People’s Militia unit.
• A Mr. Mou opened his production brigade’s food storehouse and let the commune members empty it.
• In 1959 there was a mob of commune members who looted a food storage warehouse. Mr. Wang was sentenced for an “armed insurrection” (later a writer used this as the material for the novel “The Story of Convict Li Zhongtong”. 《犯人李钟桐的故事》

Reader responses to “The Story of Convict Li Zhongtong”. 《犯人李钟桐的故事》 — this story read aloud in Chinese 张一弓《犯人李铜钟的故事》 on Baidu

I no longer remember the personal names of the main people involved in these miscarriages of justice. Their cases however can be compiled into a case history of the injustices committed by Mao Zedong. These cases reveal how during that time abuses by officials forced people to rebel. 

– 501 –

Many of the main characters in these cases were ordinary townspeople who had been caught up in the literary inquisitions and so had long been relegated to slavery. Many more were simple and honest peasants who were thrown into jail simply for trying to survive. 

After the political rehabilitations started in the Sixth Brigade, He Qingyun’s feelings became very complicated. The people whom he had trampled underfoot as counter-revolutionaries were now being rehabilitated and walking out the prison gates. He felt embarrassed and worried about that. He had many evil deeds on his conscience that now made him feel guilty. Although He Qingyun at that time had changed his tune from “Admit guilt and submit to the law” “认罪服法” to “Every wrong must be righted” “有错必纠” so as to superficially be in line with the new policy of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Seeing so many unjust, falsified and mistaken cases overturned, he worried that with all those cases being overturned would later be said to have been a “mistaken line”. What would he do if this new line too were to be reversed? Therefore he time and again delayed political rehabilitation work.

Violence twisted not just the lives of those people wrongfully convicted but also twisted those hatchet men working at the grassroots of the dictatorship. People I have discussed in this book like

• Zhang Jianbo,
• Lin Chegao,
• Zhang Choude,
• Deng Yangguang,
• Long Yudu,
• He Qingyun, and
• Xu Shikui became hatchet men who had lost their humanity, poisoned by the absurdities of class hatred! They never spared a thought for the sufferings of their victims. Now several decades later, if any of them are still alive, I wonder if they have yet located the root of Mao Zedong’s poison when the time comes to review and repent for all the shameful things they have done in their lives. 

All the guiding principles of Communist Party policy were wrong because they ignored the fundamental principles of social development. They built a political order but did not establish laws. Enforcement of the law was not based on any widely accepted standards. This left a  deal of room for enforcement personnel to do as they like. Therefore they could on a whim do whatever they liked with powerless ordinary citizens. Defiance of all law both human and divine would be a good way of summing up what the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

7. Li Dahan 

While I lay in bed for several days a dog had bitten my leg, news of Li Kejia’s political rehabilitation made a sensation in the Sixth Brigade. Li Kejia was also “famous’ ‘ for resisting remolding. Ten-odd years before, he was the only person convicted on the pretext of having committed “an ordinary non-political crime” who had been locked up for a long time with the university students of the “counter revolutionary brigade”. During his fourteen years in the Sixth Brigade, he never spoke of why he had been put in prison, presumably because this was some private matter that he did not want to reveal.

For many years, Li Kejia was known throughout the farm for fighting against tyranny. He was a strong man 1.8 meters tall so he got the nickname Big Man Li.  Since he was so big, he also had big nutritional needs so he was very dissatisfied with the half can of corn we got at mealtimes.

There were many stories about his battles against hunger. When we harvested potatoes, he took advantage of his strength to block a fully-loaded horse cart headed back to the brigade, unload potatoes from the basket on the cart, and bury them in the mountain ravines to prepare for the days he would need them to satisfy his hunger during the winter. When we harvested corn, he once gave an entire cart full of corn to his fellow villagers in the greatest secrecy and then once the harvest was finished, went back to get them. 

However if you walk the night roads for a long while you are bound to run into a ghost so he was put into the reflection circle under the guard tower. We often talk about Li Kejia being tied up and beaten there. After a while, boss Xu and He  Qingyun finally decided to transfer him to the strict supervision group so that he would go to and from work under armed escort. 

Even so, Li Kejia would still walk into his prison cell with big bags of corn in his pockets. He sewed a big pocket inside his thick cloth coat. That coat could hold ten pounds of corn without anything showing. Using his specially made cloth armor he was smuggling his “imported corn” from his field gleaned past the inspection at the tower. However the old jailers often found him out so we would often see Li Kejia in the reflection circle under the guard tower. We would also tear out “pockets” by his side and the corn taken out of those pockets. Once the secret of that cloth armor was revealed, he would be tied up or beaten. His cloth armor was ripped to shreds in front of him. 

– 502 –

Moreover, he would start sewing a new bag to carry on his back just a few days after his bag was torn up. No matter what he would be fighting to keep his stomach full.

Li Keyu escaped in order to escape from the pangs of hunger. He didn’t escape many times but he made some dramatic escapes. Two years earlier, when he was handcuffed on the platform of the Chengdu train station, he had jumped through a window onto a moving train. When he was brought back, they used steel wire to tie his hands in an unusual display of cruelty.

Li Kejia was not like the “warriors of The Torch” however. He didn’t discuss with us his views of the dictatorial government with him much. In 1976, Li Chegao nearly killed him because of the four potato men that he had made. Were the potato men just a coincidence or did he know about the big power struggle going on within the Chinese Communist Party? We didn’t know and we didn’t discuss it.

That puppet show against the “Gang of Four” was a disaster that brought him good luck. Soon after being sent to solitary confinement in the small prison, he was let out and politically rehabilitated immediately thereafter. Some details about that made people think that he must have some secrets and personal connections to the Chinese Communist Party that we didn’t know about.

Now Li Kejia had been released from prison. He was the first among those most fiercely opposed to remolding to be released. The day he left the Sixth Brigade everyone congratulated him. Just as he was about to return to his home in Dali, Yunnan Province, he took out a volume of Han Dynasty ballads and poetry that he had kept for decades and gave it to me. 

He had so treasured that book that he was able to hold on to it up until then. It was a very precious souvenir of the fourteen years we had been together day and night. I opened it. He had written a dedication on parting an eight line poem with five characters per line.  When we came the leaves were rustling, when we parted the flowers had just come into bloom, how many perished along the way! We left behind should be inspired by them, and a durable civilization enlighten the world, the Four Modernizations bring a new day, this great undertaking will not fade away, may this book of poetry be our remembrance” .  I will never forget the years we fought those wild beasts together with our bare hands.

After we parted, I heard that after he got to Dali he went to live with his big brother who was the Party Secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Communist Party Committee and got a position as the head of the county culture and education department. Later he took part in the selection of the mayor. He expected that the “the Four Modernizations bring a new day, this great undertaking will not fade away”. What would be the result?  We had different ideas about that.  Just because of that and because we had different political goals, we broke off contact with one another. 

In early April 2009, just as I was coming back from seeing a surviving friend, my friend snorted at the mention of his name. According to what that friend said, when Chen Longfu escaped from prison in 1985 he looked for Li Kejia while he was on the road in Yunnan Province. He had hoped to get some help from Li Kejia. Not only had Li Kejia forgotten their old friendship but instead prevailed upon Chen to stay for a while and then secretly reported him to the local Public Security Bureau and brought the police to capture him. Fortunately Chen Longfu discovered what was going on in time and was able to make his escape, foiling Li Kejia’s plot. Selling out his former friends whom he had suffered with in prison made everyone think of him as a shameless villain.  But that came later. 

One day when the May rainy season had begun, Guo Chuanxiao called me to the brigade office. He said that the brigade had decided that from that day onwards I would be assigned as watchman for the corn growing near Bridge Number Five. According to Sixth Brigade regulations, anyone given a job that involved living alone outside the prison had to be either someone the government trusted or a prisoner near the end of his sentence who was soon to be released.  I realized that He Qingyun and Xu Shikui would never have chosen me for that task so my release must be coming up soon. 

– 503 –

After Guo Chuanxiao notified me, he admonished me to hurry back to my cell and pack my bags since I would be moved to the watchman’s shed that day. 

8.  The Reform Through Labor Brigade’s Dog Also Bites

One day in April 1979, I went to the Forestry Brigade. Tian Jingmo had asked someone to bring me an “oral message” saying that when he went to Chongqing he made a special trip to Beibei to visit my mother. He said that she had already been politically rehabilitated and that her living conditions were much improved. She hoped that I would come home soon. He said that she had given him food coupons for 20 pounds of grain and some non-staple foodstuffs. He asked that I visit him to retrieve them. The next day, making use of the time that the tractor was working the fields next to bridge number four and went over the mountain bridge to the Forestry Brigade. When I went over the hill to pass through Oil Depot Bend, I walked past the embankment that we had risked our lives building in a hurry Dazhai-style two years before. As I walked past unbearable memories of building it flashed through my mind. 

The dike was 1.5 meters thick, 30 meters high at its highest point and stretched 100 meters. It was a neatly built flood regulating dam for a small reservoir. This “dam” was just an embankment between two fields. Just for the sake of this “political achievement”, we had been driven to work 16 hours a day every day in a bitter struggle to get it built. Whenever did the “officials” of the farm ever employ us if we were human beings? 

That winter the main part of the project that prisoners had fought to complete at the cost of their lives was finished. The evil consequences that the project brought with it were soon apparent. Two years of erosion by floods during the rainy season had already silted up the channels on both sides of the terraced fields that drain off the floodwaters. The floodwaters climbed over the irrigation ditches and went into the fields. 

The ridges between the fields built from stacked up mud collapsed one after another after water infiltrated them. Field number seven which had the highest ridges already had several breaches where the water had cut through. 

Therefore the last two years once the rainy season ended, they had sent people to “make repairs” on the gaps cut through the ridges.  It was early spring when the Infrastructure Brigade was again installing a concrete culvert to drain off the floodwaters. 

At noon, when the employees fixing the ridge between the fields had quit work for lunch. Work tools had been stacked up every which way atop the ridge. As I walked along not paying much attention, I suddenly heard a noise behind me and a cold breeze hit me from behind. I did even have time to turn around when I felt a sharp bit on the calf of my left leg. 

When I turned around, a big gray dog over a meter long was staring at me ferociously. Its two rows of sharp teeth still held bloody cloth that it had bitten off my cotton-padded pants. That beast had two front paws in the air and the rear two on the ground as it flew towards me. If he had not been shackled with an iron chain, I don’t know how I would ever have faced his ferocious attack. 

I lowered my head and looked at my left leg.  That beast had torn my cotton pants. Blood was dripping down to my heel. Hot anger erupted from my chest. I had been humiliated by people for twenty years and today a wild beast came to take its bite out of me? I forgot the pain and picked up a green carrying pole and brought it down hard on the skull of that domestic beast. I hit its head and legs over and over. 

The beast was totally shocked by my unexpectedly furious counter attack. It bowed its head and scampered off like a rat. That vicious bark had turned into desperate whimpering for mercy. Finally it curled up into a ball, hiding its head under a mat in its shelter, letting out one howl after another as I struck blow after blow on its back and hindquarters. 

When they heard the dog’s whimpering, three men came running towards me from one end of the ridge, yelling “Don’t hit it, don’t hit it.” I thought it was the headquarters vegetable group’s watchman. I put down the pole only when they arrived. The older one yelled viciously at me, “Don’t hit it. Brigade leader Li spent two thousand RMB to buy that dog to guard the apple orchard. He brought him here today to guard the tools. If you kill him, we wouldn’t be able to pay him compensation.” The two other men held tightly to my pole. 

I stared angrily at the three men, looked at the beast that had buried its head under the mat, and saw that it was already bleeding in several places. I let go of the carrying pole and bent over to look at my dog-bitten torn pants leg. Blood had soaked half of my pants leg. When I opened it up, I saw a mass of badly mangled flesh where the dog had bit. Blood was still flowing from the wound. 

– 504 –

The three farm employees squatted down and looked at my wound.  I don’t know whether the expression on their faces was sympathy or fear. They urged me over and over to go to the hospital for an operation. 

The hospital was over a kilometer away. I looked at my wound, thought for a while, and then without turning around I started walking down the main road to farm headquarters. Blood flowing down the back of my heel sprinkled my path. The passers-by all looked at me in amazement. 

I hurried to the main gate of the headquarters vegetable group. Cadre Cai came to greet me. He looked at me and asked what had happened to me? After I sat down, I outlined what had happened and explained why I had come. I asked him to give me a ride in the vegetable group car to take me to the hospital. 

He looked at my wound and explained that all the vegetable group cars had been sent to the city to get fertilizer. They hadn’t yet returned. Therefore he said that he would assign two men to take me to the hospital in a wooden cart. After he finished, he told me to wait a while.

Five minutes later I was sitting in the cart and two men were hauling me towards the hospital. By the time we got to the headquarters main gate, it was nearly 11 AM. I don’t know whether it was because I had lost a lot of blood or because I had spent a lot of my strength fighting the dog but I felt very hungry. 

I took out 150 grams in ratio coupons and 1 RMB and gave it to the two men hauling my cart and asked them to go to the headquarters kitchen to get some food for me. They took my ration coupons and in a short while came back with a big dish. By then a big group of employees had gathered around the cart asking me just what had happened. 

Just then, Yang Houmo, who had just been transferred to the headquarters vegetable group, came over. He yelled to me, “You are going to be released.” I didn’t understand what he was saying, so I asked “How could that be?”

He said, completely seriously, “The dog was making you go away. It is an omen. You have been eating reform through labor rice for nearly twenty years. You have been through a lot.” As he said that, the cart started to move again. I met many people I knew along the way. They all said that the dog biting me was a good omen.

That day, not only did I not only not go to Tian Jingmo’s place to pick up the things my mother had sent me, I was wounded that way and taken to the hospital in a cart. Yet I had over and over taught that vicious dog a lesson. I had beaten him until he whimpered and gotten that anger out of me. Receiving the good wishes of so many people that I met along the way, made me feel at ease. 

When the cart got to the gate of the First Agricultural Brigade, we ran into Li Xianghua from the water pump building who was just passing by. When he saw my wound, he would inform Brigade leader Guo when he got back and ask him to send the brigade car to the hospital to bring me back to the brigade in the afternoon.  

At two o’clock in the afternoon, the wooden cart got me to the hospital.  I was sent to the operating room with the help of the two men who had pulled my cart. The physician on duty looked at my big wound without making an expression. I immediately disinfected me, cut away the flesh that the dog had bitten and gave me a tetanus shot.

The physician doing the operation asked if I wanted a shot of morphine.  I shook my head. The operation took an hour. From that day onwards, there has been an eight centimeter long scar on my left calf. 

– 505 –

At 5 PM, Peng Wenxue drove to the hospital to pick me up as he had been ordered and drove me back to my own cell in the Sixth Brigade. In the middle of the night, the pain until then suppressed by all the excitement came. That night I tossed and turned but couldn’t sleep with all the pain reaching my mind. My ears rang with Yang Houmo’s yell, “The dog is driving you away. You are going to be released!”

Yes, it has been twenty years. I was going home. I made it. Now I was middle-aged. The best years of my life had been mindlessly worn away in prison. I had no idea what I would do. One can never foresee good or bad fortune. The pain stayed with me until dawn.  I hadn’t gotten any sleep. 

Because of my leg wound, Guo Chuanxiao gave me special permission to rest in bed.  For the first time in my twenty years in prison, I got the unprecedented “humanitarian treatment”  of being allowed to lie down to rest after being injured. 

I lay in bed for a week and took medicine to inhibit inflammation. The wound didn’t become inflammed or abnormal in any way. I had a lot of free time so I decided to write a letter to my mother. In my letter I mentioned that a dog had bit me but I mentioned it casually. For someone who had endured the tortures of twenty years in prison, being bitten by a dog couldn’t be important. 

I didn’t realize that passing reference would scare my faraway mother to death. Just as she read that letter, a woman physician named Zou Yinshuang, who had once been a Beibu epidemic control station cadre, was touring the countryside and had stopped at the Cai Family Hospital. After she heard that a dog had bitten me, she had the epidemic control station prepare a rabies immunization shot for me and sent it to me by air. By the time the medicine arrived in Yanyuan, my stitches had been taken out and I was completely cured  and had gone back to work. 

In her next letter, my mother asked how my wound was healing and sent along a picture of Zou Yinshuang. Mother said that she was 26 years old and had never been married. Because she sympathized with all my mother had suffered at the Cai Family Hospital, she had taken my mother as her godmother.  After she read some letters I had sent my mother, she not only admired my literary talents but also sympathized with my suffering. She hinted to my mother that she would be willing to wait for my return to Chongqing. 

“花非花，雾非雾。夜半来，天明去。来如春梦几时多？去时朝云无觅处。”

后来，每当我看到这张像片，便想到在母亲的身边竟有一个女人等着我，便感到心跳脸

红。

That letter brought up the subject of marriage. That was a big thing in any person’s life. But for an old boy over forty like myself, any romantic feelings had been buried by the miscarriage of justice that I had suffered. 

For years I had lived on the knife’s edge between life and death. I had forgotten that I was a man of flesh and blood and feelings. Each day I looked forward only to my next meal and hoped that I would not be beaten up or humiliated that day.  How could I have any wishful thinking about women? I stared at the photograph. Could she be my future wife? I heaved a deep sigh and said to the photograph,

I thought of Bai Zhuyi‘s poem

 Flowers are not flowers

Mists are not mists.

[Like shadowy appearances] Coming at midnight

And leaving at first light

They come like a spring dream but for how long?

Parting  nowhere to be found in the morning clouds

“花非花，雾非雾。夜半来，天明去。来如春梦几时多？去时朝云无觅处。”

Later whenever I looked at that photograph, I felt that there was a woman next to my mother who was waiting for me and felt my heart beat faster and my face flush.

---

Next: Rightist Memoir XXIX: Guarding Crops, Meeting Peasants