My Name is Number 4 (11 page)

It got colder. My bottom was like a block of ice and my legs grew numb. I received permission from a soldier in front of me to kneel to ease my cramped limbs. Hours of singing and reading from the red book crept by. I yawned and shifted my position, my enthusiasm dampened by boredom.

Suddenly, from far away, came the rumble of engines, then hysterical chanting—“Long live Chairman Mao!”—roared in the sky. One minute I was slapping my numb legs to warm them, the next I was rising to my feet, in spite of the orders not to, yelling at the top of my lungs like everyone else.

“Long live Chairman Mao!” I shouted, my voice lost in the waves of sound.

Tears streamed from my eyes. The motorcade was moving, bearing down on us. Peering between the soldiers in front of me, I got a brief glimpse of a jeep. There was Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing! And Lin Biao standing right beside her! They were
waving their red books, but their faces were pale and unsmiling. Frantically I searched for Chairman Mao. In another jeep I saw Liu Shao-qi, Mao’s second-in-command, dressed in army fatigues, looking worn down and disturbed. I recalled what Yang-yang had told us about him. My eyes followed his grim form until it disappeared, and I wondered how such a powerful man could be attacked just like the teachers in my school and the neighbours in my lane back home.

It was then that I realized I had missed Chairman Mao!

I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands, feeling cheated and lost.

On the way back through streets jammed with marching youngsters and loaded trucks, although exhausted from ten hours of walking and waiting in the cold, I hid my disappointment. Everyone was excited, telling each other how clearly they had seen Chairman Mao, how healthy he looked, how kind he appeared, how lucky they were. Some could not wait to get back to the barracks: they wrote down their impressions as the truck bounced through the streets, overwhelmed by the sense that they had participated in the making of history.

I joined them enthusiastically, using my imagination, unwilling to admit that I hadn’t seen the Chairman at all, even though I had been in the second row. If everyone else had seen him, so had I. That was what I was going to say to everyone, including my siblings and Great-Aunt. That night when I told Guo-zheng that I had also seen Liu Shao-qi, she covered my mouth with her hand, fearing I would cause trouble again.
Yang-yang pointed out that he had been in the last jeep. We all knew what that meant: he had fallen from Mao’s favour.

Early the next morning, after our last free meal, we were trucked to the train station. I had already changed my plan to stop at Wuxi. I never thought I could miss Great-Aunt so much.

8.
Pu-tong-hua
—Common Speech—became the official dialect of the whole country after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In North America it is known as Mandarin.

9.
In fact, Jiang Qing was Mao’s fourth wife.

CHAPTER NINE

J
anuary, the first anniversary of Mother’s death, ushered in another year of turmoil. More state leaders were denounced and jailed, and Chairman Mao urged the whole nation to seize power from the capitalist roaders who “still occupied the bourgeois headquarters across the country.” Confused as they were by Mao’s inexact call to arms, the people of Shanghai took action. On January 4, the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebels overthrew the municipal government, which had, so the radio broadcast told us, “turned rotten to its roots.” The coup was headed by a textile-factory security officer named Wang Hong-wen under orders from Zhang Chun-qiao, who rose to be head of the Cultural Revolution Authority for the entire country. Jiang Qing—Mrs. Mao—and Wang and Zhang, joined by a well-known writer, Yao
Wen-yuan, later formed the notorious “Gang of Four.”
¹⁰

This “January Storm” in Shanghai brought great trouble to our doorstep. Number 2, being a member of the defeated Loyalist faction, was swept up in the subsequent purge.
¹¹
The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee had received the blessing of Chairman Mao himself and it set about housecleaning with a vengeance. Soon the majority of Loyalists, after criticism and self-criticism, were identified as “good people but misled” due to their “simple but pure class feeling toward the Party.” But that was not the case for Number 2. He was set up as an example of those who “secretly supported the old municipal government while showing their resentment of the Cultural Revolution led by our great Chairman Mao”—in other words, my brother was labelled anti-Mao, a deadly charge. He was forced to sweep the floor and scrub toilets alongside former factory authorities during the day and to submit to merciless condemnation at evening rallies. The cleaning during the day was actually easier than his job dyeing rubber, and he continued to receive his salary. It was the public humiliation of the “struggle meetings” and the constant fear that things could get worse for him that hurt most.
¹²

One night when he had been allowed to come home for clean clothes, I could tell that Number 2 was scared.

“Some people,” he said, “have been beaten to death by their fellow workers in the struggle meetings, especially in factories involved in military projects.”

I was horrorstruck. “You mean the same might happen to you?”

He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I don’t know.”

The Red Terror ushered in the spring. Fighting among the factions broke out everywhere, each group claiming to be more revolutionary than the next. Factories, government offices, research institutions and communes had turned into battlegrounds of hatred. The streets on the outskirts of Shanghai rang with gunfire. The history I learned at school was no longer a theoretical study: the Communists’ struggle to eliminate all classes other than proletarians had escalated. Chairman Mao continuously harangued us that this last fight was
Ni-si-wo-huo
—You die; I live. The bare fists and bronze belt buckles used by the Red Guards were now replaced by iron rods, steel bars and bullets. The entire nation was in an uproar, and cruelty ruled.

And then Chairman Mao did what many thought he would never do. Until now the PLA had remained neutral, kept out of the Cultural Revolution. But when Mao was notified that in some areas of the country the rebels had not been successful, while in others the fighting was out of control, he relented and ordered in the army. The army’s involvement made the muddy waters muddier. And it brought
Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao into prominence as Mao’s numb er-two man.

Was this how I would have to spend the rest of my life—hiding at home, fearing for the safety of myself and my family, watching my future dissolve? The days dragged by, but my sleep was filled with nightmares, especially when Number 2 was forced to fight in the streets again, for the PLA had at last moved into Shanghai to oust a powerful faction in the Shanghai Diesel Engine Factory. The battle raged for three days. This time, the losers were not simply arrested or set to humiliating tasks. They were killed.

A week or so later a letter arrived from Auntie Yi-feng, who lived in a village near my grandfather’s house in Qingyang. As we deciphered her unpunctuated sentences and characters with bits missing, we had our worst fears confirmed. The fighting had spread strife throughout the countryside, the peasants were at war, and my paternal grandfather was right in the middle. He was attacked because he used to be a businessman and had owned a plot of land. First his house in Qingyang was confiscated and he and Grandmother were left with only one room while other families moved in. Next the rebels slaughtered his chickens, rabbits and goats to “cut off his capitalist tail,” that is, deprive him of his sideline. When he tried to stop the crazed rebels from tearing down the “bourgeois” grave mounds of his mother, his first wife and my parents, he was so badly beaten that he had to be carried home on a door, and had been confined to bed ever since. Not long after, Grandfather died of his injuries.

He was cremated, against his and Grandmother’s will. The rosewood coffin he had had made when he turned fifty was broken up by the rebels and sold for making furniture. Preparing one’s own funeral far ahead of time was traditional, and many believed that the better provided you were, the later the funeral would occur. I had seen Great-Aunt making her tiny red silk burial shoes even before she retired, each with a ladder stitched on the sole to help her climb to heaven. The Red Guards had labelled this tradition as “belonging to the Four Olds,” and punished it severely. My neighbour Granny Ningbo had been made to walk down our lane wearing all her burial outfit, followed by jeering children, then to throw the clothing into a bonfire. She died soon after the humiliation. I wondered, in Grandfather’s case, how great a part humiliation had played in his death, as he was a well-known and highly respected resident of Qingyang before the rebels attacked him.

By the time my sixteenth birthday approached, the country’s food productivity had dropped alarmingly. In the countryside, Auntie Yi-feng wrote, crops were neglected or not sown at all. “Better to have proletarian weeds than capitalist seeds,” screamed the posters. Hunger began to stalk the country again.

Probably because he realized the damage caused by the chaos across China, Mao urged us to, “Grasp revolution in one hand, boost productivity with the other,” and called upon
young people to “resume classes while continuing to make revolution.” In May, after two years of idleness, I received a letter authorized by the Mao Ze-dong Thought Propaganda Team calling me back to school.

I welcomed an end to boredom and wasted time, but I knew it was not the end of harassment from the Red Guards, so I went back with mixed feelings. Ai Guo Middle School was then in the hands of a new administration, composed of politically appointed workers, none of them qualified to run a school. Their leader required the teachers and students to address her as Master Ma. There was no sign whatever that classes would resume, as my letter had said. The teachers who had survived the cruel attacks from their own students and colleagues did not dare to teach. The students, after two years of challenging authority and humiliating their teachers, found it hard to sit down again. Most of our textbooks had been labelled “poisonous weeds,” but there were no new ones to replace them.

So, despairing that I would never get enough education to try the university entrance exams, I submitted once again to the required reading of newspapers and Mao’s quotations. Not long after the recall, I found out the real reason for it: we were all—the entire school population—being de-enrolled in July! There were to be no exams: they had been abolished as “bourgeois tools” used to “discriminate against working-class children by barring them from higher learning.” We had to leave the school to make room for younger kids like my little sister, who had never been to middle school but would be a
second-year student as soon as she walked in the door, and graduate a year later.

“I won’t even have time to warm my seat in my new school,” she scoffed.

So, after barely two years of proper junior middle-school education, I “graduated” at sixteen. My dream of completing senior middle school and going to university went up in smoke, for I had to join the work force. To make things even more ridiculous, while I and others were “waiting for work,” we were required to report to our school every day, even though there were no classes! We sat around talking and playing cards.

I was now confronted with a harsh and unexpected reality and it frightened me. How was I going to support myself?

Since all jobs were filled according to the government’s design, there was no such thing as applying for a position. A graduate of secondary school who did not go to university simply waited until the government assigned him or her a job. Those with connections “used the back door” to land favourable assignments, the most coveted of all being in the army because of its social status and security. Sick at heart, I filled out the official form, at the top of which, of course, was “political fitness,” that is, class background. I also had to list all my siblings, with their ages, occupations and schools.