My Name is Number 4 (10 page)

F
or the first time in our journey, I used the door of the train. Shivering in the cold, I made my way through the station with my friends, exhausted, hungry and aching in every limb, my laceless cotton shoes flapping on the pavement. Outside stood long lines of army men, silent in their green greatcoats and hats with long earflaps.

We marched to a nearby park where we stood a long time in the dark, some jumping up and down to keep warm, until army trucks arrived to carry us away and deposit us before a complex of large, mostly unlit buildings. There we were herded into a spacious, dimly lit room, and instructed to sleep on the floor. I did so gladly.

I dreamt I was at my school, standing before a brick wall under the relentless midday sun. But I awoke to find myself
wrapped in a blanket, fully clothed in my cotton-padded pants and coat with Great-Aunt’s knitted wool scarf around my head and neck. I was sandwiched between two shapeless forms, motionless under green blankets.

“Yang-yang? Guo-zheng?” I whispered, shaking the body beside me.

The figure turned
my
way, revealing a round face, puffy eyes and a sharp chin from which a few long hairs protruded. I scrambled to my feet in terror. I had been sleeping with a man! I looked around in a panic. I knew nothing about where babies came from—except that even as a child I understood the significance of men and women “sleeping together.” I had overheard adults’ conversations and had listened as kids at school related stories in which rape was referred to as “sleeping with flower girls.” Babies were the result. I had never asked Great-Aunt for details because I knew she would not provide them and I dared not ask others for fear of being accused of having dirty thoughts, the worst kind of criticism for a girl. So I had pictured the process as some kind of chemical reaction, like the one I studied in physics where a dog salivated when shown food. Was I pregnant now?

Terrified, I yelled for Yang-yang and Guo-zheng. All over the room heads popped up; eyes stared; angry voices shushed me.

“I’m sorry,” I announced to no one in particular as I stepped over the sleeping forms between me and my friends, dragging my blanket. After a few moments of whispering, they calmed me down.

A little while later an officer strode into the warehouse. People’s Liberation Army officers—the PLA included all the armed forces, not just the army—did not distinguish themselves from enlisted personnel by wearing insignia, braided ropes, medals or epaulets. They had four pockets on their olive drab Sun Zhong-shan style jackets instead of two. This officer was in his thirties, tall and bulky, and when he spoke, a string of words rolled off his “tightly curved tongue,” as southerners describe northerners’ speech.

“What did you say?” I asked in my Shanghai-flavoured
pu-tong-hua
.
⁸

He smiled and spoke more slowly. We were in the compound of the General Political Department of the PLA, he said, and were requested to attend a meeting in the canteen across the basketball ground. Breakfast would be ready when we got there.

With my two friends I made my way across the courtyard toward the canteen, shadowed by the biggest buildings I had ever seen. A five-story structure was considered a high-rise in China. We were given two enamel bowls, one for hot rice gruel, the other for steamed buns. To my amazement I didn’t have to show any identification to get my food. No money, no coupons were required. No wonder those around me stuffed themselves so full they could hardly walk. It reminded me of what I had learned at school about real communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Cheered by the hot food, we listened as the officer formally welcomed us and then, inevitably, set down rules. Once we had participated in a rally, we must vacate the capital within forty-eight hours because of the overwhelming number of youngsters arriving in Beijing each day. We were here to “exchange revolutionary experiences,” the officer admonished, not to sight-see and stuff ourselves with free food. Each of us was issued a free bus pass, good for the whole city.

I was overwhelmed by the feeling that, at fourteen, I was in control of my own life for the first time. Food and lodgings were free; I could go anywhere I wanted in our nation’s capital, a place my parents had talked about but never seen. I decided to enjoy this freedom for as long as it lasted. Awed by my sense of independence and discovery, I walked out the gate with my two friends. It was a bright sunny day, but without an overcoat I was chilly, even in the sun. The streets, lined with leafless trees, seemed empty compared to crowded Shanghai.

Yang-yang said goodbye to me and Guo-zheng at the corner of Hongguang Road, originally called Baiguang Road.
Bai
—White—had been replaced by the favoured
Hong
—Red. All over China the Red Guards had renamed the streets. I had even heard stories about attempts to alter traffic lights so that red meant go and green meant stop.

Guo-zheng and I wanted to visit Tiananmen Square to see the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which was described in one of my
nursery rhymes as “red brick walls and yellow glazed tiles; tall and gigantic, beautiful and magnificent.” Hunching our shoulders against the chill, we followed the twists and turns of the alleyways and found ourselves on Changan Avenue. I felt like a fish swimming in a sea of red and yellow. The citizens of Beijing had responded to the call to make the capital a “sea of red” by writing Mao’s quotations in red paint on a yellow background, plastering walls and buildings with slogans and exhortations. As I walked along past the roughly painted walls and hastily written slogans, I wondered whether people in the city had ever run out of red and yellow paint.

China’s broadest and most elegant avenue was lined with leafless trees—and temporary latrines, constructed of bamboo poles with woven bamboo mats wired to them to the height of my head. Inside the bamboo enclosures, cement paving squares had been lifted and pits dug. These were the revolutionary toilets. When full, they were covered over with earth and the squares put back where they belonged. The area was slick with frozen urine. Millions of visiting Red Guards created more than just political problems.

The red walls of the Forbidden City were papered over with
da-zi-bao
. The Palace Museum itself was, to my disappointment, closed, because sightseeing was discouraged as unrevolutionary. Guo-zheng and I sat on the broad steps of the Great Hall of the People across the road and rested in the sun. Later, tired, we returned to the barracks.

Our newly assigned room had once been someone’s office. Six bunks lined one wall. After another hot meal, the officer in
charge called us to a meeting and asked us all to state our class background and report on our day’s activity in the “heart city” of our country. I prepared myself to lie again when my turn came. I was stunned when one girl told the group that she was from a shopkeeper’s family. How could she be so stupid? I thought. Surely she would have trouble heaped upon her?

But no one showed any resentment. I realized that here, too, the “capitalist roader” had taken over as the number-one class enemy. I began to relax a little, but lied anyway when it was my turn, reporting that I had spent the entire day closely studying the
da-zi-bao
on the walls of the Forbidden City.

Yang-yang, fervent as she was, read out the accusations she had copied down at Qinghua University. The most dramatic and shocking of these attacked Liu Shao-qi, president and second man after Chairman Mao. He was declared the number-one capitalist roader who aimed to change the nature of communism. Worse than all this political denunciation was the information from his private life.

According to Yang-yang’s notes, Liu Shao-qi had married five times. She had written down the details of each failed marriage. There were even cartoons of Liu and his latest wife on the posters, Yang-yang reported. I listened, gaping, as she gave out information that until then had been treated almost as a military secret. Any gossip about the private life of our leaders was a sure road to severe criticism and punishment. It had been revealed only recently that Mao Ze-dong himself had a young wife named Jiang Qing and, although people were naturally curious about her, no one dared speculate
about Mao’s personal life.
⁹
Ordinary citizens like me lived in an environment where we had to reveal every detail of our personal and family history for several generations back, yet in this society where the word privacy did not exist, the impression had been given that state leaders led the life of nuns or monks. But if the president’s life could now be turned inside out like a dirty sock, I wondered, who would be safe?

The afternoon following Yang-yang’s scathing report, the women’s bathhouses opened. It had been almost a week since I had washed in warm water and I rushed to line up. Two hours later, after a long shower in gloriously hot water, Guo-zheng and I decided to go out and have a treat: candied haw berries, famous in Beijing. My hair was still wet, and soon I had icicles clicking at my ears. I paid dearly for this foolishness. That night I developed a high fever and ran from one nightmare to another. My own screaming woke me up, and in the morning Guo-zheng fetched a doctor. My temperature was around forty degrees and I was taken to the infirmary on a stretcher.

If the plentiful food at the canteen was a luxury, the hospital was paradise. The ward was much brighter and cleaner than the one I had seen when visiting Mother at the hospital in Shanghai. There were five beds in the room besides mine, all filled. Mine was like a cloud. I lay on a spring mattress and bounced up and down on it. The nurses were friendly and kind, so different from people in the outside world, where it seemed to me that yelling and shouting filled our everyday lives.

When I had recovered several days later and began to eat again, I was even offered a choice of food. What an easy life! Great-Aunt would have said, “Hold out your arms and you will be dressed; open your mouth and you will be fed.” At night we patients were entertained by a song and dance troupe.

One day after I had left the infirmary I learned at the evening meeting that there would be a big rally at the airport the next day. We would see Chairman Mao with our own eyes! Preparations must be made and, of course, new rules laid down.

First, we were paired up at random, each partner under the other’s responsibility and scrutiny—a common surveillance technique. No one was allowed to leave the compound until the morning, when we would all depart for the rally together. No pocketknives or sharp metal tools were permitted. We were reminded how vast the crowd would be—hundreds of thousands. While marching we should never, ever try to pick up anything we had dropped, or we might never stand up again. Each of us was issued a pair of extra-long shoelaces and instructed on how to bind them tightly around our insteps, since the thousands of trampling feet around us might grind our heels and pull off our shoes. Not only would the lacing technique keep us from injury or even death, it would aid the street sweepers who usually faced mountains of lost shoes
when the rally was over. On the way out of the canteen everyone was to be given a paper bag holding two boiled eggs and two fat steamed buns stuffed with pickled vegetables.

I couldn’t believe I was going to see Chairman Mao in person! I had seen his picture all my life, staring at me from walls, buses and store windows. In real life I saw people aging or even dying, most of them much younger than Mao; but he, in my eyes, didn’t seem real. He was like the immortals I read about in fairy tales, never one day older, with the same smile and the same mole under his mouth. The songs and slogans called him the sun, the rescuing star of our universe. Was he really a great man? Or was he the author of all our misfortunes as I had always believed? I wondered if my attitude would change after I saw him.

Before we were allowed to climb into the military trucks early the next morning, my partner and I, a girl from Anhui Province, searched each other in front of another pair, then reversed roles with them. After an hour’s jouncing along the cold streets, we were dropped off about five kilometres from the airport and ordered to form ranks. We marched eight in a row under a cloudy sky, scrutinized by PLA soldiers and officers, singing our revolutionary songs. Even the fierce wind from the northwest didn’t seem too bad. Compared to my night parade in Shanghai months before, this one was a picnic—and much more exciting.

Bright chalk lines divided the tarmac at the airport into squares. There wasn’t an airplane in sight. Each square could hold at least thirty rows of twelve spectators. The sun was
peeking from behind the clouds when we sat down, as instructed, on the icy cement, cross-legged, like the soldiers in front of us. Because I was small, I was put in the second row, so I was certain I’d get a good view. We were required to remain seated throughout the rally so everyone could see, and under no circumstances were we to rush the motorcade.

At noon, I broke out my food, peeling chilled eggs under the envious eyes of those who had eaten theirs earlier. Although the steamed buns were now hard as a rock, I didn’t dare drink too much water to soften them. There were toilets, but they were far from us and no one knew exactly when Chairman Mao would appear.