Find other chapters listed at Kong Lingping’s Rightist Memoir I: “Blood Chronicle” By Long-time Prisoner of Mao Zedong
The full Chinese text can be downloaded from bannedbook.org
Book Three Chapter III I Teach for a While
According to Chinese folk customs, the twelfth lunar month is the day for offering sacrifices to your ancestors. That day was tomorrow. During the Cultural Revolution, however, folk customs were swept away as remnants of feudalism 封建残余. Today, the people who lived with my mother in the dormitory have gone home for the Chinese New Year. The whole building is cold and desolate. There are only a few patients, my mother and myself. Although it is better than what I sent through in prison, it still made me feel all alone. I thought about my family members who had died. At noon, Mother Hu came.
Her child walked behind her carrying a basket just like last time. After they arrived, mother seemed to have been waiting for the child. She took her aside and gave her a little gift of New Year’s money and asked, “Why didn’t your little brother come?”
– 602 –
Mother Hu replied, “Their father hasn’t arrived yet. Fanshan went to the train station to meet him. I decided to take advantage of that to bring over to you some things that I set aside for you for the New Year.”
As she said that, she took the basket from her daughter, took out the prepared cured meat and dumplings and said, “Please come to enjoy the evening meals with my old man and I tomorrow evening.” Mother said that if Zhong doesn’t come home for Spring Festival, we’ll go to their home on the third day of the Lunar New Year. Mother and daughter then said their goodbyes and returned home.
- Visiting Their Home
The next day was the eve of the Lunar New Year. Zhong Zhiyuan still hadn’t returned. We didn’t have any other relatives in Sichuan Province so we took the Fan family home as our own. In accordance with Chinese folk customs, on the third day of the Lunar New Year, mother and I went to the Fan family home.
This adopted family which had suffered so much lived on a hillside on Lotus Brigade land two miles from the hospital. On a pass between low hills, tile houses with mud walls all around are half-hidden by bamboo forest.
Just outside their home is a small pond of about a third of an acre. I think that the fish that Fanshan and his sister gave their mother came from this pond.
When my mother and I appeared at the mountain pass, Uncle Fan, the younger brother of Mr. Fan, was working in the private plot beside the house. When we saw us coming, he shouted to his elder brother, “Shan, godmother is coming!” Mother Hu, hearing the sound coming from outside the wall, came out. She was wearing an apron since she had been feeding the pigs. I saw her go to the door with the little girl behind her. She didn’t follow her mother out the door though. She looked out and slunk back inside.
When we reached the pass, Uncle Fan greeted us. When we came close and reached out, he brushed the mud off his hands and said apologetically “I am very dirty!” He was an old man with a strong body. Although he was past sixty, he still walked at a steady, spirited pace.
Mother said that before “liberation” he had been a missionary for The Consistent Way Yiguandao Chinese syncretistic religion so soon after “liberation” he was arrested and sent to prison for five years. After his sentence was over, he continued working on the reform through the labor brigade. Prison had made him nearly deaf so he didn’t talk much. Twenty years later, he was still a “convict released after serving his sentence”.
Looking at his simple and honest old-fashioned face, it was impossible to link it with the insidious and treacherous face of The Consistent Way depicted in Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
Xu Fengsheng lost her mother at a young age and lived a dependent life with her father, Xu Zhonghou (played by Han Yan). When Xu Fengsheng was sixteen years old, Wang Jishan, the leader of the feudal cult Yiguandao, found Xu Zhonghou and deceived the father and daughter into joining the sect. At the same time, Xu Fengsheng’s aunt, Xu Shuyun, also joined the organization. She was not only swindled out of her money but also forcibly taken by Wang Jishan.
Seeing her mother’s downfall and depravity, Zhang Jianhua, heartbroken but helpless, chose to join the revolutionary forces. Xu Zhonghou’s already meager savings were exhausted by Wang Jishan’s repeated deceptions. Gradually, he began to realize that Wang Jishan was a complete fraud, but it was too late; he was already powerless to resist. Meanwhile, Wang Jishan, aware that his scheme had been uncovered by Xu Zhonghou and his daughter, decided to kill them to silence them.
– 603 –
Accompanied by Mother Hu and Uncle Fan, my mother and I stepped across the threshold. The unique country stink of hogwash greeted our senses. In the pigsty to our left slept two piglets they had just bought at the market.
Mother Ma walked into the back room, busily washed her hands, then took out the long-prepared noodle soup from the cupboard, mixed in sesame and peanut sauce, and placed the bowl on a wooden table next to the window. This room is both a kitchen and a dining room. Firewood occupied one-quarter of the room. Next to the stove were piled bamboo leaves gathered from the hillside bamboo forest. I suppose that such frugal people are not to be found in many foreign countries.
Their little girl busily picked up firewood piled up in the courtyard, split it with a hatchet, lit the leaves piled into the stove and stirred the water in the wok on the stove. After doing this, she sat on a small stool next to the stove, adding the leaves to the stove.
I suddenly saw, reflected in the red firelight of the stove, the fresh face of the young girl. It was such a beautiful face!
After a while, the water in the wok boiled. Mother Hu shaped the dumplings and put them in the wok. Mother quickly waved her hand and said, “Don’t cook too much. We just had breakfast!” Mother Hu smiled and said, “When you visited here before, we didn’t have anything to give you. Today, we have food in our cupboard. This is the first time that my brother has come to be a guest in our country home. Don’t be a stranger! Be sure that you eat your fill of dumplings.”
As she spoke, she picked up a big bowl in which the dumplings were already floating and told the little girl to hand it to me. I quickly got up and thanked her, saying, “What wonderful food!” Uncle Fansmiled and said: “We country people have nothing to offer you. Be sure to eat your dumplings. Don’t be a stranger.” Ater saying that he took a big bowl and set it on the table, sat down opposite and began eating with us.
For the first time in twenty-three years, feeling Uncle Fan’s straightforwardness and sincerity, Mother Hu’s enthusiasm, and the little girl’s shy restraint, a happy country family, with Mother and I joining in, I felt happy.
We talked as we ate, the subject being “things are better now” 昔不如今. This was not just the line the Communist Party in “indoctrinated” us with in the Communist Party newspapers like their propaganda about “the old China”. This was because of the deep scars that the Great Chinese Famine had left in the Chinese peasantry. So comparing the past and the present was very natural.
Mother Hu pointed to the two food baskets surrounded by bamboo mats in the side rooms. She told us that after they got land under the contract responsibility system last year, the three of them had harvested four thousand pounds of grain. That came to nearly three times the rations allocated to them under the old people’s commune collective production system. She couldn’t help sighing, saying “We couldn’t live like human beings before. I hope the policy won’t change back to what it was. If country people can just manage to eat their fill, they will be happy.”
When the topic of Uncle Fan’s salary came up, he said he spent it all on the education of Fan Ping and her younger brother so money was tight. She said: “I didn’t get an education, so I have spent my life working the loess soil and my back to the sky. City people don’t grow crops but still have food to eat. Country people work themselves to death growing crops just to feed themselves. Things work this way because country people are not educated. That is why we have spent all our money on educating our two kids.”
Once she started her efforts to persuade me to help, saying “Brother! You are a college student and well-educated! Fan Ping is your little sister. She is in the fourth year of lower middle school at Chongqing Middle School No. 24. She’ll graduate next year. This is a crucial time for her. Please help her graduate from lower middle school. She is determined to pass the test to go to teacher training school or something like that. This is her chance to get free. She shouldn’t be like her mother who has been illiterate all her life and lived in an impoverished mountain ravine all her life…”
– 604 –
After lunch, my mother suggested that Mother Hu and her little girl go with us to Zuofangou to give New Year’s greetings to the old friends who had helped her.
Mother said that Zuofangou had been the “barefoot doctor” station workshop in Caijia twenty years earlier. When Caijia Hospital was established, it was used as a temporary clinic. The hospital director decided to dig a well there to solve the difficulty of getting water there. At that time, mother had been sent to Beibei for labor reform under the supervision of the hospital.
The hospital gave her cleaning work that nobody else at the hospital was willing to do back then. Cleaning the boilers, disinfecting the hospital, cleaning the inside and the outside of the hospital. Every day left her exhausted and discouraged. Evenings she was forced to work overtime digging a well. If she didn’t complete the extra work, she was not allowed to sleep.
Forced labor quickly destroyed her already weak body. In the dead of winter, my brother did not return home from studying at the Huangpuping Electric Power School 黄桷坪电力学校. One early morning, a neighbor, Aunt Tian, when she got up to draw water and prepare breakfast, saw in the frosty morning someone lying on the ground on the well worksite.
She hurried over and saw that it was that old woman who was terribly mistreated by the hospital. was the most deceived old woman in the hospital. She was lying unconscious and nearly dead on the frozen ground. Aunt Tian shouted for her eldest son who carried Mother to a bed in Aunt Tian’s home.
Aunt Tian quickly added a tree stalk to the brazier in her home, and heated up some ginger soup. As she warmed Mother’s body by the fire, she poured the ginger soup into her mouth. After a while, Mother slowly woke up.
It has been 15 years since my mother fainted beside that well. That incident left much goodwill. Later, every time Mother mentioned his incident, she would praise Aunt Tian and say, “If Tianjia and her son, I would probably have frozen to death at the well drilling site in Zuofangou. Ever since, Mother has considered her an “elder sister” with a different surname. Whenever Lunar New Year comes, she invites visits with the Tian family to thank her benefactors. Today is the first time she brought me to see the Tian family home for the New Year.
A grape trellis and a bamboo atop and earthen embankment and rammed-earth walls surround the Tian family courtyard. Behind the house is a bamboo forest. When a group of four walked from the road to the ridge at the edge of the courtyard, a small yellow dog barked to warn its owner.
The white-haird master of the house, a white-haired woman of about sixty came out. When she saw us, she quickly greeted him. She took both of Mother’s hands and said loudly “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” She is two years older than Mother, but the vigor of her movements make her seem younger.
– 605 –
It was a fine day. The grapes were starting to sprout on the vine. I deeply inhaled the fresh country air. Mother took out two pieces of clothing from her bag, things she had bought for Aunt Tian and her daughter at the Caijia Department Store.
As we sat beside the grape trellis, Aunt Tian began talking about her past. She said: “Liu Ba at the hospital told me many times back then that Fang Jianzhi is a bad person, and that the poor and middle peasants should not be deceived by her pitiful appearance. But I told her: ‘You young people have something to learn about morality. One day you too will be old. You shouldn’t bully lonely old people.’ Then that woman told the secretary of our production brigade that I sympathized with a rightist. The Secretary asked me and I answered ‘They also talk about the conscience of Heaven and Earth! Old Ping never harmed anyone so what right does anyone have to insult her?”
Family members gather to talk about everything and watch the sunset. We got up to leave, finishing our full day of “visiting somebody else’s home”. When I left, Aunt Tian said to me: “Your Mother has suffered a lot during the years. Now that you have come back, you should stay with her. Don’t be like your brother. To this day nobody knows where he is.”
My younger brother was sent to the countryside after graduating from his electric power school. He had been planning to settle down here. To this day, Aunt Tian’s son still has the farm tools that my younger brother used to use. These past ten years we have had no news of my younger brother. Mother gets very upset whenever his name comes up.
2. Middle School Number 24
On the morning of the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, the hospital went back to work. My mother had just opened the small window at the registration desk when at the outside window stood a young man and woman asked Mother, “Is Teacher Kong Lingping there?” I looked up, astonished. Their two faces were familiar but Mother couldn’t remember their names at the moment.
Mother said to herself “My son has only been back for four months. How does he know these young people?” Then she asked, “Which work unit are you from? Why are you looking for Kong Lingping?” The young woman answered, “We are teachers from Middle School No. 24. The school leadership has asked us to discuss his job.”
In the “reception room” Secretary Wang had set up, I received the two visitors from the Middle School No. 24. They introduced themselves. The man was named Li Xingquan, the woman Han Zehong. Both were math teachers. Before the winter vacation, when Math Department teaching and research group leader Zhou Xing arranged the class schedule for the next semester, there was a big argument.
According to the “order” of the Education Bureau, two additional classes had been added to Middle School No. 24 but no additional teachers had been hired. The increased class time was compulsorily shared among the teachers. Because the teaching load then far exceeded regulations and the opposition of the teachers, the dean’s office had no alternative but to reduce the weekly class time of all the students.
The upshot was that one of the parents of the students reported this to the Education Bureau. That resulted in the leadership of Middle School No. 24 being severely criticized. As a result, from the beginning of the next semester, the missing time had to be made by the teachers assigned to the course. The Math teachers would have to teach an additional four hours every week.
Teacher Han said with a sad face, “From now on, I have to teach 32 class hours each week. That is, I have to stand on the podium for over five class hours each day and I have to go to the class almost every day. I have to stand in the classroom all morning. The female teachers are most worried about standing all morning. Last semester at Middle School No. 24 after standing all morning, I left the lectern and fainted at the door of the classroom.”
“If you figure out the hours, in addition to the five hours lecturing in class every day, we have to prepare for class, correct homework. That comes to twenty hours a day. That is not teaching, it is working yourself to death! We young people don’t want to go to an early death. If next semester they really do force us to take on extra classes then we will have no alternative but to take a long vacation.”
Zhou Xing, the leader of the Math Department had to ask the school’s director to solve this problem. He Xilian is well-known as the Devil Incarnate 活阎王 in the Caijia area for his overbearing style. Later, probably because he was attacked during the Cultural Revolution, he had to spend nine years in an “ox shed” for educated people doing manual labor in the countryside. That cured him of his arrogant attitude. After the fall of the Gang of Four, he got his old job back. He seemed to have learned his lesson and was now more restrained in the way he talked and acted.
– 606 –
When Zhou Xing invited Zhou Xing into the Math Department office, however, He Xilian put on that sinister smile that he had never been able to rid himself of and said, “I know that you have had a hard time. I have told the Education Bureau many times about the problems our school has because it is short of teachers. Today there is a teacher shortage and the Education Bureau can’t find anyone and so has implemented compulsory overtime. I hope that you can all understand that.”
When he got to this point he squinted a bit and said in a flattering tone, “However, the Education Bureau recently did tell me about a politically rehabilitated person living in Caijiachang who had been a student at Chongqing University. In 1957, he was labeled a rightist. Now he is here in Caijiachang waiting for arrangements to be made for him. His mother is at Caijia Hospital. If you tell him about your math classes, then I promise that whoever persuades him to teach Math will have their weekly teaching load reduced by five hours. What do you think?”
Naturally, any teacher overwhelmed by overtime teaching welcomed any new teacher who came to share the teaching load. He Xilian offered work hour reduction as an incentive to current teachers who recruited new teachers. School Director He, during the Anti-Rightist campaigns, had convened struggle sessions against Rightist teachers. Now any teacher he went to visit nursed grudges against him and would refuse on the pretext of being too old. That forced him to use a new tactic — using teachers to recruit teachers. The young teachers understood that very well but they had no alternative. After a discussion in the Math Department, the teachers decided it would be best to send those two young teachers to the hospital to try to recruit me.
I listened to their story. The eyes of those two young people begging me for help brought me back to a story that Qian Qifan’s sweetheart had told when we were freshmen at Chonqing University. I thought back to how Mao Zedong had ruined the lives of so many “stinking intellectuals” as well as the tragedy of those ignorant young people who had persecuted them. Thinking of the arrogance of the same murder, the sadness of young children who have never learned. I could easily refuse the sly indirect requests of the old hard-liners but I couldn’t ignore the pleas of teachers and students for help.
When I thought back to those days and to my mother’s advice, I felt very conflicted. Teaching is of course a noble profession. Nobody was interested in teaching because teachers’ lives had been ruined, they had low social status and low pay. I wanted life to quickly get back to normal and put an end to my uneasiness. There was still much I wanted to do and I couldn’t keep wasting time looking for work. So there was no reason I couldn’t become a teacher at Chongqing Middle School No. 24. Once I understood the situation better, I could make other plans. So I readily agreed to their request.
Teacher Han’s eyes were wide with astonishment. What the Education Bureau was powerless to accomplish, they had done easily in just ten minutes. They felt that a great weight had fallen from their shoulders. They couldn’t thank me enough. When I escorted them out the hospital door, they couldn’t stop shaking my hands. Li Xingquan kept on urging me to take the job for fear that I would change my mind.
The next day they visited again to convey New Year’s greetings. They took a pack of pounds of white sugar from their “bag” and said: “The school leader asked me to give you this for New Year’s. The school is giving this to all the faculty members during the Spring Festival.”
Then he took out a high school mathematics textbook from the schoolbag, a math reference material, two textbooks and a pen. Zhou Xingzheng has been waiting for the news. Once he heard that I had agreed to teach, he even arranged my class schedule. Since I was a novice teacher, I would need some time to get used to it. For the time being, he gave me the math class of the first and second years of high school for now. I had a teaching load of sixteen hours a week.
I said: “I haven’t studied teaching, I am afraid that I won’t be able to do it.” Li Xingquan said: “Don’t be so humble. College students from the fifties like you are in short supply! You are a hundred times stronger than those who graduated from teacher training colleges during the Cultural Revolution! That was how I returned to the math books after twenty-five years. An old student who had been banished to the countryside to waste twenty-three years there, I hadn’t been trained as a teacher. I stepped out of prison directly onto the teacher’s lectern.
Fortunately, I got a very solid foundation in Math and Physics in middle school and some more in Yanyuan when I tutored Guo Chuan’s two little boys. I had always felt a deep sense of responsibility for my work. I could never “neglect the children” by seeing teachers as merely a way to earn money.
In the afternoon, Fan Xiaomei and her younger brother came with a basket of eggs. Mother Hu usually collected the eggs. She was thrilled to get the news that I would be teaching Math at Chongqing Middle School No. 24. Soon she came back with her school books. She was already a third year junior high school student . She said, “I have never understood Math and Physics. Kids are always talking in class and the teacher never does anything about it. She teaches the most advanced class but I am afraid that even she doesn’t understand it either. It is as if we are just putting in time, like passengers on an airplane, until we graduate from lower middle school. How do we ever learn anything that way?”
– 607 –
After she said this, I remembered how enthusiastic Mother Hu had been about me tutoring her daughter in Math and so I promised to start tutoring her from the first lesson onwards. That way I could familiarize myself with the middle school curriculum in Mathematics and Physics. From then on, she came to the ward I lived in with her school bag eager to learn everyday.
Two days before the school started, according to the school’s notice, reported to Chongqing Middle School No. 24. The general manager of the administrative office handled the procedure for me to come onboard as a school employee and assigned me a single room in the teachers’ dormitory at Songlinpo on the north end of the campus.
The next day, I officially moved into the faculty dormitory of the 24th Middle School. That out-of-the-way corner of Caijiachang, I had a refuge of my own from the wind and the rain.
Secluded though it was, the 50,000 square meter campus was covered with greenery and surrounded by farmland with an overhanging rock to the east and, at the foot of the mountain, the main road to Beibei and beyond it to Chongqing.
The four-story teaching and administrative office building was in the center campus. Two three-story teachers’ dormitory buildings to the north and south were hidden in the forest greenery. Taken together with the 8000 square meter playing field in front, the school was quite large. During the War of Resistance Against Japan, this was a military logistics school built by the Kuomintang military based there.
After victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan, the Nationalist government changed this base into a state-funded high school, named for Yue Yi, a distinguished Yan Kingdom scholar during the Warring States Period to reflect its role in identifying and cultivating talent.
That beautiful environment did help mold the character of its students. The seclusion and the mountains make it a special place to study.
It was sad to see how the Chinese Communist Party had ruined that wonderful, beautiful campus. Under the assault of the wind and the rain, the yellow powder wall of the former military school buildings had worn down to the mud walls. Termites hollowed out the beams leaving rotted wood and mud which collapsed into a pile of rubble. I don’t know when the school buildings were built. Nobody cared for them. There were broken windows and broken tables and chairs. The big playground was covered with layer upon layer of deep thatched grass as if nobody had taken care of it for years. Moss covered the stones on the paths to the school buildings.
– 608 –
On entering the school classroom building, I found the junior middle school classrooms in the front of the second floor. Many children ran through the whole building. From time to time, came the sound of broken glass and falling tables and chairs. The noise continued unabated after the class bell rang. Only after ten minutes did the noise in the corridors gradually quiet down.
I didn’t have class on the first day so the department chair Zhou Xing suggested that I sit in on Teacher Liu’s senior high first year section three math class.
Most of the senior high school first year classrooms were on the third floor. The third floor was a little more orderly than the second floor. When I walked into Teacher Liu’s fourth section class classrooms where Teacher Liu was attending classes, I was immediately shocked at how chaotic that classroom was.
Up there was Teacher Liu, who was something over fifty, shouting and screaming himself hoarse! He often slammed his points against the blackboard but it did no good.
Children who were already fifteen or sixteen years old were fighting and teasing each other. On the back of some of the students sitting at the front, someone had put a paper with a drawing of a tortoise that made the students sitting behind them laugh! Two girls were singing some songs in the chorus! What kind of class is this? All it was was a playground for naughty children!
I felt very sorry for Teacher Liu up on that platform getting on as he was in years! I imagined that he had carefully prepared a class that evening but now it was all wasted on these immature kids.
I realized that I hadn’t learned any lesson in pedagogy from Teacher Liu. I turned the experience over and over in my mind. The next day when I took section two of the senior high school first year class, my first task would be to impose order in this playground of a classroom.
That evening, thinking of what I had seen of that chaotic classroom that day, I didn’t have the heart to prepare a class but went over to Li Xingquan’s dormitory to have a chat with several teachers who lived in nearby rooms. I started with a simple introduction and discussed the situation in the school. All the teachers were very concerned about the chaos in the school.
Only Teacher Li Hong teacher was indifferent. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, even taking over his father’s old Chemistry class. His father had been driven out of the school during the Cultural Revolution, dying there after suffering from depression. He said that he would be as stubborn as his father. If the students didn’t pay attention, he would stop teaching and just tell them stories.
“Anyways, the school’s purpose is to keep these kids in school and off the streets where they would cause trouble!” Only people with his helpless attitude towards the remnants of the Cultural Revolution would treat students this way. That attitude was nothing but cheating himself and cheating others. That kind of attitude did, however, fit in with the agenda of the rulers but it was not the right attitude for someone who teaches to educate and build character.
This school too suffered during the Cultural Revolution. The most senior math teacher, Luo Mou, couldn’t take the taunting and blows of his students anymore. In 1969, he hung himself at Wangjiadayuan.
At about 10 PM, the teachers returned to their dormitory rooms. I walked downstairs alone, feeling very uncomfortable.
Prison nearly killed me. In prison, I compared myself to a “slave”. Now I was “politically rehabilitated” but the rights and wrongs of my situation were still far from settled. My “destiny” was still in the hands of others. I felt aggrieved that I had been sent to this out-of-the-way school on an errand to keep stubborn and naughty children under control.
As I thought about it, I walked alone to the biggest old elm tree at the entrance of the education building. The students said that that tree was over one hundred years old — a witness to all the changes that had taken place over the past century.
As I walked, in my mind’s eye I still saw that chaotic classroom. I heard the rustling of that old tree in the cold wind that seemed to be telling me a story of a vanished time long ago.
– 609 –
Prison is such an unhappy place. Nonetheless reading is a pleasure there. It’s really true: “I don’t get tired of old books even after re-reading them many times. I read them thoroughly, think deeply about them, and come to understand.”
In those days, to save books from the destructive clutches of the eagle-eyed thugs, I racked my brains for ways to hide them under tiles or under a pile of straw to preserve the knowledge that the authorities want to obliterate!
I was astonished to find that students in such a beautiful environment treat knowledge like shit and think reading is a stupid thing to do! Mao Zedong committed monstrous crimes!
3. In the Classroom
Today was the first day of my class. To establish a good class order, when we started I gave them three rules:
- Don’t make noise in class.
- Don’t read novels or do anything else not connected to your classwork.
- Do all homework assignments.
My serious attitude and style shocked my forty students. The noise and argument I saw in Teacher Liu’s class didn’t happen in mine. That made me feel that students can be molded as long as the teacher is strict. As long as political hooligans do not interfere, the harmful attitude leftover from the Cultural Revolution can still be eliminated.
The only thing I fear is that the ruling party is stubborn and mischievous, and sees education as a shabby affair that can only serve as a thin veneer covering social chaos in order to deceive the outside world. They use the phrase “Education builds a prosperous China ” 教育兴国 to trick the people. They say empty words about improving the educational environment and raising the social status of teachers to fool society. Today we only need to look at the terrible condition of our educational facilities, at our poorly educated teachers, and the low social status of our teachers to know that it will be difficult for Chinese education to recover.
During the second lesson, I followed the educational plan and reviewed middle school mathematics such as solving quadratic equations. Following the lessons that they had prepared during winter vacation, I wrote work on the blackboard for two students to come up with to solve them while the other students did the rest. Later I would go to the blackboard to make corrections and comment on their work and point out areas where students often make errors.
So I called the student Zhou Yun to the blackboard. I called his name twice but he didn’t answer. I looked around the classroom and asked: “Did your classmate Zhou Yun come in today?” Turning his head to the back of the class, someone made a nasty laugh.
After hesitating, a tall boy sitting in the last row stood up carelessly without saying anything. He did not go to the blackboard.
Then a boy with a round face sitting in the third row said in a foolish tone, “Teacher, he’s just dumb!” The entire classroom erupted in laughter! I could hear the rabble-rousing tone in his voice. I screamed at him, “I didn’t call on you. Why did you open your mouth?”
The laughter died down. That child hadn’t expected that a teacher newly arrived at Middle School Number 24 would give him such a rebuff. Unwilling to look weak to the laughing face of that boy who had stood up, he yelled, “Little brother Zhou, you needn’t keep standing!” After that teasing, Zhou Yun plopped down in his seat and the class laughed again.
I didn’t expect to face this in my second class. I realized that the round-faced child in the third row was the naughty student leader in this class. If I did not take a firm stand against this public defiance, I would never have a peaceful classroom.
– 610 –
Straight away I ordered him to stand in front of the class. The class immediately quieted down.
I suppose that no teacher had ever called him on his naughty provocations. The round-faced child probably didn’t expect that his “little joke” which ordinarily would be nothing would earn him such a strong rebuke. His completely unexpected reaction left him panic-stricken. They stood up obediently but still had an arrogant attitude. He didn’t dare defy me. After he walked to the blackboard, the classroom quieted down again.
All the students were paying close attention to their teacher’s attitude, trying to size me up. If I didn’t handle this properly, there would be serious consequences. After two minutes of silence, I began.
“Have you ever given a thought to what it took for you to be able to come here and study? Have you thought about how, at this very moment, your fathers and mothers are sweating in the fields with their backs to the sky and the faces to the earth? They skimped on their own rations, sold pigs, and raised chickens, and watched their expenses closely so that they could afford to pay your school fees. Do you think that was easy? Do you really think they did all that you could come here to play in class, contradict your teacher and get into mischief?”
I paused, letting my eyes sweep over the student standing in front of the blackboard. He looked sad and helpless. My attitude had shut him down.
I continued, saying “If your parents agree that you came to school to fool around, then I think, why should you bother to come to school at all? If you don’t want to study, there is no need to come into my classroom. Aren’t you freer outside of class? Why do you need to? If you are not willing to study, you can not enter the classroom, how is it free outside the classroom? Why sit in the classroom and make yourself miserable?”
The classroom was silent, and it looked like my words had at least given the teenagers, who were still in the dark, something to think about! I was convinced that if I could restore these children’s senses, I could effectively bring order to the classroom!
“If you didn’t come to school to fool around, if you really want to get an education, you will need to have some ideals and some goals in life. Let me warn you. The ancients said “People who do not work hard when they are young will regret it in their old age.” 少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲 You shouldn’t associate with those who go aimlessly through life. You are still young, in the young and vigorous period of your life. You still have time to seize that opportunity. If you waste your chance at getting an education, you will regret it in the end. You will not only have let your parents down but you will have wasted your life!”
As I continued, I noticed that some students were busily taking notes. From the way they looked at me, I could see that they had taken in what I had said!
After class, I called two students into the office to ask them about the situation. The round-faced child, Yang Fu, told me that his parents were both peasants. None of his relatives or friends had escaped fieldwork through study except for one cousin who passed the university entrance examination.
Just the opposite. His uncle and cousin never went to school but they made a fortune in business. There was also his father’s uncle who hadn’t studied but had made a lot of money as a driver. So he had concluded that studying is for fools. Going into business was much better than wasting time studying. That was his “life experience.”
When I asked him “Why do you come to school?” He replied “My parents are forcing me. Studying at a lousy school like this is no good. This academic year nobody passed the university entrance examination so everybody in the end had to go back to the countryside.” If you study, you get this kind of life! If you don’t study you also get this kind of life! So he decided not to study.
– 611 –
I couldn’t argue with him about that but I’ve heard that nearly all students say that! Twenty years later, completely by accident, I saw an advertisement on that street in Chongqing’s Beibei District for the Lighthouse Construction Company. The advertisement was signed by General Manager Yang Fu, the general manager. Curious, I found that that old naughty boy now runs a construction company worth millions of funds, has two villas and a small car. How cruel life has been to him! Teaching is a profession with no future in this society. When I asked Zhou Yun, he told me quite frankly that while he agreed with Yang Fu, he didn’t think that he personally had anything to worry about. His father, the head of the nearby silkworm production farm, had already arranged for a job for his son. He said when he graduated from high school he would become a secretary and driver in the silkworm production farm. So he didn’t go to school to study, only to get his high school diploma.
He said: “I can drive. Driving is the most sought-after job these days.” It was true. Back then, a poor teacher simply could not compare with a car driver in terms of income and social status. I realized that he pretended to be dumb in class simply because he looked down on me.
To him, there was no such thing as “the pursuit of knowledge” or being idealistic. His father’s position gave him a secure future. Why does he have to chase after some “ideals”? The privileged class created in this society has always regarded education as an ornament.
After graduation, I never saw him again. Students told me that he was driving a car at the silkworm farm and that they often saw a young girl in his car flirting with him.
Later, when I taught children, they would often bring up the example of Zhou Yun to contradict me, saying “What good is studying and saying that the future is bright? No matter how hard you study, you won’t do as well as someone like Zhou Yun who has a good father.”
I had no answer to that. Aiya! The Chinese Communist Party divides people artificially into classes, tramples on the Five Black Categories [landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists] and created that new aristocracy of the Five Red Categories [poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, soldiers of the revolutionary army, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs].
Now the “Princeling Party” has been born and is making a meteoric rise! It seems like the ones who are ignorant are not the children but me.
Alas! If education keeps going this way, society will be filled with meaningless diplomas — it will just be a bunch of illiterates. The Chinese Communist Party’s old way of boasting and lying has become a habit. What’s more, the CCP’s old virtue, bragging lies, is a habit. The old crippled bull of “education” is now being burdened with dragging along the old broken-down cart of “pragmatism” called the “Four Modernizations“.
The knowledge of humankind grows steadily every year. Chinese education is certainly advancing by “leaps and bounds”. For example, as the number of college students grows, many of them will be illiterate in both general culture and the sciences. Therefore talking about the “revitalization of education” under the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is just empty talk!
4. Everything Depends on Your Willingness to Fight
Aunt Tian and Hu Deming told me that before I returned that Mother had had enough of being insulted by some of the social dregs working at the hospital. This was the result not only of the Chinese Communist Party’s breaking down people into five categories for “class struggle,” but also came from the worst part of the Chinese character — insulting the weak and fearing the powerful.
My mother is no weakling but having been an educator for so many years she is fairly restrained. How could she stand up to people full of foul talk who are always boldly rebelling against any kind of social constraint? Moreover, she has lost her sons and family many years before. How could she, an old woman, stand up to the brutal pressures of the dictatorship of the proletariat? That is why people pitied her for being too weak.
– 612 –
Having just returned to her side, I realized that the character of people in Chinese society under Communist Party rule had become so degraded. Crude dog-eat-dog behavior was ever present. I aggressively protected my mother so the lowlifes at the hospital feared me and so my mother was safe under my protection.
Those who used to bully my mother have changed their attitude. At least they have become superficially polite. When I started teaching at Middle School No. 24, I was busy brushing up on my Math, writing lesson plans and improving the atmosphere of my classroom so I didn’t get home the first two weeks. Fortunately, my hard work was rewarded with a good evaluation. The parents of my students had already passed the word that a university professor was teaching at the school, that his courses had excellent content, that he was elegant and refined in the classroom. The talk about me was encouraging.
The weather was getting warmer and I needed to switch out my clothing for the warmer weather. I chose a morning without classes to leave my room at 8 AM for this hospital.
The first thing I heard when I went into the hospital was a woman screaming in the back. She yelled, “Fang Jianzhi, I don’t have any money. Today you spend your own money to buy food for the mess today!”
Her tone of voice shocked me. That woman, He Yu, the hospital mess cook, was just 20 years old but talked like some old boss. Probably because she had been corrupted since childhood by the Cultural Revolution, she was not only gluttonous and lazy but very lackadaisical in her work as well. The only thing she had going for her was a sharp stinking mouth she was willing to insult others.
During my over six months at the hospital, I had often seen her arguing with the patients. That is why both hospital staff and patients often made veiled criticisms of her, giving her the nickname “Little Shrew”.
Hearing her yell that way, the first thing I felt was how arrogant she was to use that scornful tone of voice to someone three times her age! Buying food for the hospital mess was the business of the cooks. What business could she have ordering my mother to do that especially since she was very busy registering patients?
If this had happened a few years ago, when the mother was still supervised by the staff of the entire hospital, young people would have been used to swearing at her and treating her like a slave! Now, even though the Chinese Communist Party had moved my 63-year-old mother into a different category and the Communist Party considers her to have been politically rehabilitated, how could people still be screaming at her?
So I stopped going up the stairs. He Yu so far hadn’t seen me. She was still screaming with enthusiasm: “Fang Jianzhi, let me tell you, if you don’t go buy food there will be no lunch today. If people complain, they will complain about you!”
It was market day and so many people were coming to the hospital to see a physician. I saw how very busy my mother was in the registration room. She had no time to pay any attention to her. That “little shew” was yelling this so that all the hospital staff would know. The funny thing was that none of the hospital staff spoke out against that unreasonable woman.
Today, it was up to me to cure this savage woman of her attitude or my mother would never have peace at the hospital. Once I had my mind made up, I went to the back of the hospital. Still screaming, she hadn’t expected that I would suddenly appear. When she saw my angry face advancing towards her, she became anxious and suddenly shut up.
“Buying food is obviously your job. What gives you the right to tell an old lady to do your work for you?” Angry, I called her out very bluntly. She had nothing to say. Very embarrassed, she turned right around and retreated to the kitchen.
– 613 –
But she immediately realized that shirking her responsibilities in front of so many people was just too embarrassing. To say anything in reply would be humiliating, even though she is just yelling at some rightist old lady. Other people treat her that way so why can’t I? Then thought turned her into one of those housewives who curse everyone and everything so she yelled, “Hey, what business is this of yours? Does hospital business have something to do with your farting? What gives you the right to interfere?”
I barged right into the kitchen and yelled at her, “You should get this one thing straight. Times have changed. There is no place now for your overbearing manner. You are unreasonable and rude. You weren’t brought up properly so now I have to teach you this!” I grabbed her hand and yelled, “You need to make it clear to everyone just who is responsible for buying food. She saw how very angry and was terrified that I would give her a beating so she didn’t say a word.
Just then, Wang Ming came in from the courtyard to the kitchen and asked, “What are you arguing about?” To him, mother and I should simply work all the time as nice obedient slaves, usually not saying a word. Why not all that aggression and fury?
He told me sternly, “You are an intellectual, someone familiar with books and ideas. If you have something to say, then say it. How could you get into a big argument and make a fuss with a hospital cook? In front of so many people you get so angry as if you are going to beat her up. You act like that and people won’t respect you as an intellectual.”
Once he had spoken up, the previously speechless He Yu now got the courage to speak up. She immediately said loudly, “Secretary, you can see he is so mean. How can he be allowed to interfere in the business of our hospital? What gives him the right to teach me a lesson?”
The onlookers began to speak up, everybody with their own perspective on the matter. From the second floor window, I could see that many people had gathered. It appeared that the root of the rude, unreasonable treatment, ratifying every insult my mother got at the hospital, was the party secretary himself! Confronted with such a vicious lower ranking official, I couldn’t curse, but in front of all these people I had to speak up for what was right!
So I turned to him and asked: “You are the head of the hospital. Excuse me, what kind of work does my mother do now?” The secretary of the king will answer and say: “This, we have handled her case about the policy on political rehabilitation. She got back her staff job. Now she is a cashier and handles hospital registration. The organization gave her responsibility for handling money which shows our trust in her. She told us she is very satisfied with her arrangement in the organization. If you don’t believe me, ask her.
I followed up, “Who should do the work of the kitchen staff of buying food?” He couldn’t put off this unexpected question so he had to answer, “Well of course that is the job of the kitchen staff!”,
“In the arrangements you have made for the kitchen staff, your cook for no good reason didn’t do her job but instead yelled at a lady three times her age as if she were her maidservant to do it. Does that make sense?”
The onlookers suddenly erupted, shouting, “It makes no sense at all. That little shrew is completely unreasonable!” I pointed to the registration desk. “Everybody take a look. It’s very crowded today. Many people have come today to get treatment. What do you say about someone like He Yu who yells at other people demanding that they do what she should do herself?”
Everyone looked at the registration desk near the door and the long line there. Everyone was shouting! Everyone put the blame on He Yu!
Party Branch Secretary Wang realized that this was very bad for the hospital. He quickly shouted to He Yu: “Xiao He! Why did you ask Teacher Fang to go to buy food?” He Yu, seeing that she was in big trouble with so many people against her, said timidly, “She didn’t give me any money so how could I buy anything?”
“Didn’t you see how busy she was? Why don’t you go to get money from her? What are you still yelling?” The woman deflated like a rubber ball, picking up the backpack that she had thrown into the courtyard and went to the registration office to get money to buy food.
– 614 –
After Wang Ming sent the woman away to do her job, the people gathered nearby gradually dispersed. Wang Ming told me in an even tone of voice, “You see here people are very obedient. Don’t start arguing with them at the slightest provocation. You are a teacher and so should be careful about the influence you have on people.”
I looked at the cold laugh on his face and replied, “The way people here casually insult elderly people is the tradition of this hospital. If I hadn’t come by today, Yu Fei would have forced my mother to go buy food.”
I looked at his sleek face and sneered: “The hospital’s style of casually deceiving the old man is the tradition of your hospital. If you don’t touch me today, then He Yufei forced my mother to buy food!”
After she got off work at noon, Mother came back to the dormitory and sighed, “That is how things work around here. Before you came back, the cook would at the slightest provocation throw the food backpack at me. When that happened, I could only swallow my anger, put on the backpack and go buy food. Sometimes I was delayed and she would curse me!”
5. My Mother is Treated with Contempt
The discrimination and scorn my mother felt for many years bothers her to this day. How could she have calmly continued working at that hospital? She kept applying for a transfer away from that hospital in truth only so that she could enjoy some peace in her old age. How pitiful is that! Yet she was still treated as if she were a beggar, her case being bounced back and forth between units responsible for handling political rehabilitation cases.
After I started teaching at Middle School No. 24, my mother got busy planning for a “home” to be allocated by the hospital. After the prospect of a marriage with Zhou Yinshuang fizzled out, arranging a house for me became her top priority.
According to Chinese tradition of filial piety, of the three most serious violations of filial piety, not having children was the most serious. Although a trumped-up case had robbed me of my youth and my prime years for romance, the most important things that remained for me was to marry and have children. Therefore “a home” became Mother’s top priority.
Now the hospital was adding an additional floor to its two-story building in order to provide staff housing. When the project began two years previous, At present, the hospital is stepping up on the basis of the original two-story building to solve the housing requirements of the staff. Two years ago, when the expansion project and the process of invalidating the accusation against her of being a rightist and beginning her political rehabilitation, the party branch secretary had pointed to the building plans and assured my mother, “Our hospital needs people like you who can do many kinds of necessary tasks like registering patients and compiling statistics on the entire work of the hospital. Nobody here can compare with you in the number of years that they have put into this hospital. According to your length of service and according to rehabilitation policy, you should certainly be first on the list for housing!”
Looking at the housing being built day by day and remembering the kind words of the party branch secretary, she planned for a new home in the future, hoping that these great responsibilities could be accomplished before she passed away. She failed to consider, however, who much of that contempt she had felt for so many years still lingered.
In the 30 years the Chinese Communist Party has ruled China, the common people have not had a chance to build housing for their own rest and recuperation. Over the past several years, now that people are allowed to work on their own account and that people gradually became able to fill their stomachs, people became much more interested than ever before in building a “nest” for themselves.
Peasants lived in rude thatched cottages where at least they had shelter from the wind and the rain. Urban Chinese, however, faced the worst housing shortage in the entire world. According to Chongqing statistics of the time, the average Chongqing resident enjoyed less than one square meter of living space.
A family of three living in a 10 square meter small room was quite well off. Back then, many people were often crowded into a single room in collective housing with just a cloth separating them. Under the sinister rule of Mao Zedong, the “wanderers’ ‘ 吉普赛 spent their energies in political movements. Absent a state investment and plan, nobody dared to build their own unauthorized housing on state-owned land.
After Mao Zedong’s death, the new Chinese Communist Party rulers issued the slogan “bring order out of chaos” while the common people came to blows over miserable housing. Murder and arson were often the result.
– 615 –
Although the State Council issued regulations on allocation of housing to employees of state-owned enterprises, the regulation stipulates that priority will be given according to the employee’s length of service and the order of allocations made accordingly.
Grassroots party organizations, however, applied this rule completely differently! Grassroots party bosses, by changing the rules or trading on it for their personal advantage, began to gain power through their authority over the allocation of housing.
Many people either openly or covertly began fighting over the allocation of housing from when the foundation of the housing was laid. That kind of fight was a Chinese specialty not often seen in other countries. What it really was that once the hollow boasts of the Communists were exposed for what they were, many people who became utterly destitute began to fight as if awakened from a dream.
That naked grasping for power regardless of the welfare of other people continues down to this day. That way of treating the sharing of advantages will continue until the day comes when that tyrannical power is completely broken up.
Once the new housing is completed, then the party branch secretary “assumes command” of allocation housing according to the correlation of forces in the work unit and the various interests involved.
Then according to the opinions of committee members housing allocations are made according to “the size of the person’s contribution to the work unit, their length of service, their professional skill, and the level of their position”, a scoring method that reflects the interests of the members of the group. Every work unit applied the regulations in a way completely opposite to the State Council‘s prescription that points were to be assigned according to length of service!
The Communist Party has adhered to the “confidentiality” principle. Ordinary people had no business asking about Communist Party policies and the party resolutions. The housing allocation committees took full advantage of that. They treated the housing regulations and scoring method decided on by the staff members as a “top secret decision” of the Communist Party.
The timid hospital staff dared no question about the housing regulations and so the hospital leaders and workers who grabbed an unfair advantage by flaunting the red flag used that “black box” decision-making process to serve their own interests.
According to the rules prevailing at the time, Caijia Hospital set up a committee for the allocation of new housing with Wang Ming as its chairman. The housing allocation regulations had not been announced at the time of the first allocation of housing at Caijia Hospital so it was done in great secrecy. The forty-odd staff members of the hospital had no idea how the decisions had been made.
Thus when the time came to allocate housing, when the announcements were made, even if they were in error, they were already a fait accompli. In work units like that, the practice of deceiving the good and fearing the wicked had become so well-entrenched that nothing could be done about it.
My honest mother, however, even after living through two decades of humiliation, still believed in the “sweet words” of Wang Ming. She thought that she would have priority any way you looked at it even though she had been deceived over and over by the Communist Party throughout her life. Some people told her, while housing was under construction, that Wang Ming had been lying to her. Nonetheless, she still believed in the assurances of Party branch secretary Wang!
She counted on her fingers only five among the 40 employees who had over twenty years of service to the hospital. She ranked first among them and twenty housing units had been built. Those five people in two rooms each came to just half of the first tranche of housing to be allocated.
Wronged for 23 years and living in a room next to the toilet, anyone with even the slightest bit of humanity would not deprive her of her clear right to be allocated housing!
– 616 –
The day before housing was to be allocated, however, the method for allocating housing had still not been announced. A few days later she packed up her bags in a room in which three people had originally lived. She tied up clothing in boxes and old rags. She got ready for the move that she had been waiting for for so many years into a decent family “home”.
Because I had never experienced a housing allocation, I didn’t know how much trickery was involved and had never seen any regulations about housing allocation and the housing allocation process. I had no idea how much plotting by the people in power went into allocating housing.
Moreover, I had just begun teaching high school Mathematics and was so busy familiarizing myself with textbooks and teaching overtime that I hadn’t paid close attention to the allocation of housing to my mother.
Not until Sunday when I went home and Mother told me that the hospital would assign new housing the following Wednesday and that she hoped that I would come home to help her move things. I asked, “Which rooms will you move into?” She nodded and replied, “That hasn’t been announced yet.”
I took leave on Wednesday morning. When I entered the hospital gate, I heard loud voices upstairs and saw clouds of dust coming down the stairway. I covered my mouth and hurried up to the second floor. There I saw hospital staff members hurriedly moving their things up the third floor. When I rushed to the “sickroom” where my mother had lived, I could only see that it was empty. There was wastepaper and empty bottles all around but I didn’t see my mother.
Mother’s paper boxes and wooden bed hadn’t been moved yet. Doesn’t that mean that she had been waiting for me to move it? Surprised, I hurried up the third floor. The two sons of the cook Qin Guoxiu were moving a big box upstairs. The corridor was piled high with boxes and personal possessions.
Finally I squeezed by and found a mother in a room. I saw her lost in thought sitting on a pile of cardboard boxes that had just been moved upstairs. I looked around the room. It had only one window on the northeast corner that looked out on the corridor outside. It usually didn’t open because people would be passing by.
As soon as you entered and closed the door it became just a “pocket room” with no ventilation and no sunlight. I sat down next to my mother and asked what was going on? Mother looked at me woodenly and described how the “housing allocation” process had gone.
Not until the previous afternoon when the hospital housing allocation leading group that allocated housing to mother back then posted the housing allocations to all the staff members on the downstairs bulletin board. Only then did she realize that Party Secretary Wang’s sweet words about allowing her pass a happy old age, that is to allocate her a home she could spend the rest of her life in turned out to be just a pocket-sized room with no ventilation.
The sanctimonious Secretary Wang Shuji had now vanished with a trace. Instead, the housing allocation committee acted as his confidential agent in giving mother his ultimatum: she must leave the room she was occupying by the end of the next day.
She couldn’t get to sleep at all that night, thinking about all the hardships she had suffered, how the Communist Party had brought her so many calamities, and how her family had been ruined. She had been persecuted, deceived, and she had spent half her life as nothing but a slave of the Communist Party. She weeped to think that she kept on being bullied down to this very day.
She thought that he would wait until the next day, waiting for her son’s return to have a talk with the hospital, so she put off moving out. How could she have expected that just after she went to work, that four nurses from the nursing staff and Zhang from the reception office would hurriedly crowed into that sickroom my mother lived in and, despite my mother’s protests and efforts to stop them, moved the bags and boxes that she had packed up to that room she had been “allocated”.
– 617 –
I thought of the lines in Du Fu‘s poem
“South Village children mock my old and powerless state,
How can they dare steal right in front of me?
Brazenly, they hug the thatch and take it into the bamboo grove…”
Song of the Cottage Broken by the Autumn Wind
Du Fu 茅屋为秋风所破歌
The Autumn wind roars angrily,
Peeling three layers of thatch from my roof.
Thatch flies across the river, scattering on the river bank
Flying high tangling in the treetops,
Flying low whirling and sinking into the pond depressions.
South Village children mock my old and powerless state,
How can they dare steal right in front of me?
Brazenly, they hug the thatch and take it into the bamboo grove,
My lips are dry, my throat is parched, I call out but no response comes,
Returning home, I lean on my staff and sigh.
Shortly, the wind calms, the clouds turn an inky color,
The autumn sky grows vast and dark towards evening.
My old quilt is as cold as iron,
My dear child sleeps poorly, kicking it into rags.
Leaking roof, nowhere is dry,
Pouring rain, never ending.
Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, I’ve slept little,
How can I endure the long damp nights til dawn breaks?
Oh, if only I could have a vast mansion with a thousand rooms,
To shelter all the cold scholars of the world with happy faces,
Undisturbed by storms secure in mountain fastness.
Alas! When will I suddenly see such a house before my eyes?
When that autumn wind batters down my home and I freeze to death in the cold, death will be welcome!
It was just by continual taunting that she was forced to move into the new home that had been assigned to her. She was never allocated decent housing and so bore that resentment for the remaining seventeen years of her life.
When I heard her say this, I went out and looked around the entire floor. The entire set of ten apartments totalling twenty rooms were already occupied. The two empty houses to the northwest, one was occupied by hospital chief Li Defu and the accountant Xu Xiaolong who both had less than eight years of service. THe other house, full of tools, was set aside for the new deputy hospital head who had yet to arrive.
All the apartments that were well-ventilated and well-lit were taken by hospital “cadres” big and small. The hospital leaders had racked their brains and carried on secret conferences amongst themselves in order to allocate the housing privately during the past year.
Finally it was in the open! The housing allocation subcommittee led by Wang Ming and Li Defu did not follow the principle of allocating housing according to length of service. Instead, they used their power as officials to take completely private what should have been an open process of evaluating everyone openly according to a points system.
Under Communist Party rule, the people continue to be bullied, looted and deceived. We had endured it for over two decades. We had seen through the pretense of publicly looting good people under the pretext of making a “proletarian” revolution. That kind of robbery appeared right in front of me in the form of housing allocation at a small rural hospital.
Naturally my mother had long taught and admonished me that we are not allowed to speak up when people rob us. But I had never imagined that people could be so evil!
This time, however, I could not contain my anger at this deceit and humiliation. I charged upstairs and found Wang Ming to talk some sense into him. Wang Ming was not in his office. There was only Li Defu sitting there uneasily. He raised his head from time to time, looking out the window to see what was going on in the building When I saw me angrily charge in, he understood what it was about and stood up.
“What method did you use to allocate hospital housing this time? I didn’t greet him when I entered the room, thinking that I was already being polite by not screaming at him.
Hearing my criticism, he felt guilty. He had been at the hospital just seven years and had deprived my mother of her priority in this first allocation of hospital housing. He realized that there was nothing that he could say for himself. Unlike Wang Ming, he didn’t say anything as unreasonable as “This is an internal affair of our hospital. You have no right to ask about this.”
“You are talking about your mother’s housing!” He sighed and began to answer, “She certainly has the longest service of anyone in the hospital. We have already taken special care of her. We gave her a room exposed neither to the wind nor the sun. It is the biggest room on the entire floor.”
The Party is good at gaslighting people with straight-out nonsense. They never blush at their own words. I instantly shouted at him, “Since it is such good housing, my mother will exchange it with you! You gave her a completely unventilated room. You forced her to move into that room and got the least air and sunlight of all. Do you have any conscience at all? Moreover, I have already returned. How dare you put her into the single person’s category. Are you afraid that she will go to the United Front Work Department to report you?”
I sighed and made a proposal, “Everyone should move out of the rooms that they have occupied until we understand the situation and then make a new allocation of housing. That is the only way. I won’t be satisfied with anything less.”
– 618 –
Li Defu knew he was wrong and got very worried. He was afraid that I would accuse him of using his rank at the hospital to openly pillage the apartment that should have gone to senior hospital employees. That would be hard to explain to all the workers at the hospital! He was still embarrassed and struck dumb when Secretary Wang suddenly came into the office.
Li Defu had some sympathy so retreated into his own office. When Wang Ming heard my accusations, he said with a straight face, “What right do you have to come here to overturn the collective decision of the housing allocations subcommittee? What right do you have to say that we handled your mother’s case according to that standard for unmarried staff members? Hospital staff like You Zaiyu and Xiao Xinfang have families too. They all got only one room. Did you ever stop to think how many people there are in the hospital? Everybody wants to be allocated an apartment. How can we possibly do an adequate job of allocating so few apartments? This time we gave your mother priority in getting an apartment. So what could be the problem?”
Determined to keep on deceiving everyone, he seems to have prepared for this. The rights of the workers and fairness has always been a “balance” that he believed must be maintained. He used that scale in this housing allocation process. In allocating housing one must ignore one’s conscience. That in his mind is what “Communist Party spirit” means.
Xiao Xinfang whom he had just mentioned was a twenty-year old nurse who had just come on the hospital staff. According to the allocation of housing by seniority principle, she would not have gotten an apartment. She got one because she was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and her husband, who has a position at the local supply and marketing agency, had some personal connections. That was how she was able to compete with my sixty-year-old mother for an apartment.
The apartment Wang Ming had arranged for her was next to mother’s and included a three-square-meter “kitchen” that they shared. Caijia Hospital then had only five Communist Party members. Except for Wang Ming himself, all four were allocated apartments. These were all “young people” with less than ten years seniority at the hospital. Given the housing shortage, none of them qualified on the basis of seniority to compete with my mother who had worked there for a generation.
I asked: “I want to ask you two questions: First, why did you not follow the State Council regulations and allocate housing according to length of service? Secord, why did you not you not issue the rule for apartment allocation and give everyone their housing allocation score beforehand?” I raised my voice because I realized that people, drawn by the sound of our argument, had gathered. e; and secondly, why do you not have a housing regulation? Everyone in the room is graded and published in advance?” I raised my voice because I noticed that the door was attracted by our quarrel, and all the patients and nurses.
Here it was not simply a matter of right and wrong. Not only was my mother cheated but in the future not being able to raise her head.
I had argued with that man so determined to hoodwink the public. That had been the argument about the kitchen staff buying food. I wouldn’t let this matter go by. I knew that my mother’s position could only be changed by “struggle”.
Wang Ming also knew that if, in front of so many onlookers, he should be defeated by a recently released labor reform release criminal who had just been sentenced, his prestige would be completely gone. He knew he had to win by “using his power to impose himself on others” so he deliberately provoked me. “Housing allocation is based not only on length of service but also on the number of family members. If your mother were to have gotten two rooms, the staff would not have accepted it.”
This was a direct slap in the face. Mother’s spouse Zhong Zhiyuan lived in Deyang and was going to return to Caijia to retire. He deliberately left out that fact. And me standing there right in front of him, was he going to “erase” me too? I was already forty years old and was going to settle down and start a family soon. Doing that would depend upon the apartment that mother was allocated.
What’s more, from the start, when the Education Bureau assigned me to Middle School No. 24, I was told that they would keep mother and I together. Without an apartment we can live in, isn’t “reuniting” us simply emptied of all meaning!?
– 619 –
Once I had peeled away one-by-one his various pretenses that he had “implemented policy”, Wang Ming said unexpectedly: “Middle School No. 24 should take care of your housing.” The reason he gave was that I am an employee of the school.
I was clear that my mother, the loyal and honest person that she was, had been deceived by their trickery. As for the deception carried out by the Education Bureau, from the very start I had had no faith in their promises.
I know that I would need to fight to get better treatment. No manna would fall down from Heaven. Naturally, Wang Mang, as I, someone he could once have easily crushed by attacking me as a Rightist, now confronted him in front of so many people, could not help having his embarrassment turn to anger. Rely on the talent of party bosses to be extremely unreasonable, he slapped the desk and yelled,
“What right do you have to come here? You should be clear on your own status here. You have no right to interfere in the internal affairs of this hospital. Even if you had, you would have no right to criticize us.” He shouted himself hoarse in heedless fury! I could see that he was stamped from the same mold as Baldy Wang. That kind of person is ferocious and terrifying but they have empty hearts.
In politics, if you don’t have the advantage, the only thing you can do is to trick and cheat. Especially if they have no moves they can take against the people who are diametrically opposed to them. So as not to show weakness, I pounded on the desk in return, “You hid the truth from everyone and allocated housing privately. You hoodwinked the public and went against what policy stipulates. I can go to the district committee and report to you.”
This made him so angry that his face turned ashen gray. He shook and pounded the table, “Get out, clear out of here!” Several young members of the medical staff, led by Li Defu, alternately pushing and persuading me, dragged me out of the office. The office door slammed shut. Then the people gathered in the corridor began debating the matter. Some surrounded me, telling me stories about how the Caijia hospital used to bully my mother.
As I walked to the well in the rear courtyard, I saw over a hundred onlookers yelling at the tops of their voices, their curses flying towards that office window. This was not just mindless complaining. Everyone within ten kilometers of Caijia Hospital knew about the bullying and abuse my mother and some other people with bad family backgrounds had suffered at the hospital. Now as a resident of the area of the Caijia Street Committee, I now had the opportunity, on behalf of my mother, to press charges about the abuse and miscarriage of justice that my mother had suffered for well over a decade there.
Then I heard a loud voice from the office yelling into the telephone. Wang Ming was shouting into his telephone. “Hello, is this the Caijia police station? Please send someone to the Caijia Hospital immediately. Someone is inciting a disturbance here.”
He shouted it out so that I would hear. outing was clearly called to me. I saw that calling for “class struggle” didn’t work anymore. Struggle meetings weren’t held anymore. The old methods of persecuting the Black Five didn’t work anymore. If he was to continue his bullying, the only thing he could do was to call the police for help. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that he is still using that method that they had been using against me all along — cuffing me and hitting me to shut me up, the more I was determined to keep speaking out even more vigorously.
Now the people who had moved upstairs stuck their heads out the window and looked down. They didn’t realize that Wang Ming was making a phony phone call to scare us. They didn’t know that Wang Ming was playing with a fake phone to deliberately scare us. Or maybe he did call and Officer Wang in the household registration division wasn’t interested and decided not to intervene in the incident involving Wang Ming that had just occurred at the hospital.
I stood in the courtyard next to the well for several hours but I didn’t see anyone like a militiaman or a policeman come to the hospital to “maintain” order. Only when my mother came down to persuade me to go back up to our room did I slowly leave the scene. Then the crowd of onlookers gradually dispersed.
Mother asked me to enter her “new apartment”, but I was still angry. I immediately argued that my mother’s things should be moved back to the old sickroom. I wanted to keep the pressure on and make the matter grow, and in the end bring it to the city health department or even to the city committee so that political rehabilitation policy would be implemented in my mother’s case. I wanted to bluntly argue that she should be allowed to return to Chongqing’s Beibei District and see how the district committee and the district health bureau would handle the matter. I wanted to see if the bully style of the Caijia Hospital would be encouraged or stopped?
– 620 –
My mother, however, kind and timid as she is, stayed calm, saying “Just put up with it. All that for an apartment? Step back a bit and relax. We have a place to live so let that be the end of it. We can just watch and see as they get what’s coming to them later on.”
The way mother sees it, the Chinese Communists run everything, and whatever the Communist Party says, goes. That stoic attitude made the people at the hospital continually abuse it. Later they even blocked pay raises for her several times. Later when she moved back to Beibei District, right until she died, she never even had a retirement home.
One could say that Chinese people have made ‘forbearance’ into a virtue. People exhorting the public to stoicism have even reduced it to formulaic advice and into aphorisms that are posted everywhere. I’ve always thought that these exhortations to good behavior go much too far, tortured phrases exhorting people to be happy with what they have although in the end they never are at peace.
Of course, “forbearance” sometimes can be a tactic for opposing tyranny. Unprincipled forbearance however is just giving in to the despot.
“Living in peace with one another and not getting into arguments” sometimes is just what Chinese rules need to carry out their despotic rule. The ancient Chinese nation, like other nationalities around the world, have been feeling the effect of nationalist ideological trends that originated in the advanced countries of the west for nearly two hundred years now. Despotism still has a solid position on the China mainland. One reason for that is that despotism has grown deep roots into the ‘forbearance’ of the oppressed peoples.
During the 28 years of Mao Zedong’s rule, the Chinese people submitted to miscarriages of justice and brutal enslavement. Their mouths were sealed by bayonets. A dictator-made famine swept the entire country in which people willingly ate grass and the bark off trees, living lives of extreme deprivation. They dared not rise up in opposition but instead held to the ethic of “forbearance” taught them by their ancestors.
When I think back to how for twenty-three years I submitted like a domestic animal I submitted to whippings and beatings, except for rage at being enslaved by the Chinese Communists and putting my anger into words, I realize that I too have to get used to it. Today I still swallow my rage and stay close to my mother. Except for “renting” in that pocket room, what else can I do, throw rocks at Heaven?
As I look to the future of the Chinese nation with my own unfortunate eyes, I see them still see them submitting to exploitation from the privileged social strata, to the corruption that goes on right in front of their eyes, to shameless dissipation and immorality, and the continual extreme viciousness with which they treat working people.
Chinese tyranny and Chinese forbearance complement one another to harm the ancient Chinese nation.
People willing to put up with anything really do save themselves a lot of trouble in the short run but by sacrificing justice, people sacrifice something that would enable them to protect their own human rights.
Those who put up with abuses encourage the savagery of those in power. Those who don’t put up with it on the contrary are murdered by the despots. From that situation comes the wise sayings “Put up with small things and quietly plan a big rebellion” and “Hold your temper for a moment enables you to avoid one hundred days of worry”. 忍得一时之气免得百日之忧
Now I understand why Mao Zedong swept the “Four Olds” 四旧 , scathingly refuting loyalty, filial piety, humaneness and righteousness but did not criticize the concept of forbearance.
From then onwards, every morning when people started up their stoves and the only one meter wide corridor filled with smoke from the cook fires became so thick that it was hard to breathe and spread then from the corridor penetrated into our apartment though the crack between the door and the frame. Since there was no window for the smoke to go out, it just whirled and whirled around inside, often making mother cough continually.
– 621 –
As for me, I had to settle down with my wife and bring up children in that room. Even Xiao Fang, our next-door neighbor, took advantage of mother’s forbearance to expand her own area.
The kitchen shared by the two families was filled nearly entirely but her own pots, pans and bowls. Her husband used the supply and marketing cooperative car to travel between the areas under the jurisdiction of the Caijiazhen grassroots government. At the Goods and Materiel Bureau warehouse, the Agricultural Machinery Station and the Militia Bureau, the police station he had circles of friends and acquaintances and so their room was often very lively and full of guests.
At 9:00 in the evening, after the sound of the car horns were heard down below, soon would come a group walking behind their male host. After coming upstairs they would gather into that room and do two things. They would play Mahjong and drink. Smoke would immediately fill the little three-meter square kitchen as a succession of fried dishes were brought out of the kitchen. Then the entire hospital building would rock with the sounds of people playing the finger-guessing game.
After eating and drinking, in swirling clouds of cigarette smoke, the mahjong table would be brought out and clatter of mahjong would go on all night. Mother couldn’t sleep in her apartment next door and so was forced to often take sleeping pills.
The next day, I got up and opened the door. I wanted to buy some soy milk or something for breakfast. I tried to walk into the kitchen but the small room was piled high with empty bottles and unwashed pans, dishes and fish, ducks and chicken bones.
Things were piled so high in the kitchen that you couldn’t even step in there. I would carefully move some cups and plates to make a little space for myself, go in and get the little kerosene stove out of the kitchen with great difficulty and go back to my own pocket room and put it on that little table that we hadn’t thrown away, lite the flame, live just a if were were back to that solitary existence in the little sick room on the second floor.
Our neighbor completely occupied the small kitchen and so mother’s dream of creating a small home in the end all for naught. My many years in prison had damaged my health and so I often cough if I weren’t very careful. So as to get better, after I started teaching at Middle School No. 24, I sought to create a regular pattern in my life. With all the trees there, the air was very good so every morning I would get up at 6 AM and go to the exercise field and go for a two-kilometer run.
Evenings I kept up the habit of quietly thinking and reminiscing. I prepared to write about my life’s experiences and use those facts to attack the dark tyranny we lived under. The injustices and abuse that my mother and I have suffered throughout the implementation of our political rehabilitation spurred me on.
During the Chinese Communist Party’s era of reform and opening up of the Chinese Communist Party, the economy was reformed but the political system continued along according to the old pattern that Mao Zedong had laid down. The people’s demand that the body of the old tyrant be desecrated by burning and the ashes scattered was refused. We could only practice our ‘forbearance’ in the face of Chinese Communist bullying.
By happenstance that remote place far from the noise of the city at Middle School No. 24 gave me just what I needed for reminiscing and meditating about the past as well as giving me a space to practice forbearance. I started to carry out the plan I had made long before and started writing bits and pieces of my recollections in order to prepare for the long process of writing my extended memoirs.
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