My Name is Number 4 (4 page)

“The physical achievement of your hard work is not nearly as important as your mental accomplishment through living with the peasants, the best teachers in life,” he began.

As he droned on, he kept glancing nervously at the school’s Communist Party Secretary Fang, who stood to the side in the shadows. Something is up, I thought. Principal Lin went on to say that, contrary to custom, we would not have the next day off to rest. We must return to school. That was when Secretary Fang cut in.
⁵

He announced that all our regular classes would be suspended until further notice. We had a lot of catching up to do in our political education, he said. We would be studying documents from the Central Committee of the Communist Party—the “May 7th Directive,” the “16th Circular” and editorials from the
People’s Daily
newspaper, the main mouthpiece of the Party. Drooping in the heat, I paid little attention when he declared that a new movement was about to start.

When I finally got home, Number 3 told me that her classes had been suspended as well. Number 5, who had been cramming and beavering through exercises in preparation for her middle-school entrance exams, had been thrown into endless meetings and discussions, too. She was delighted. After watching her four siblings killing themselves with study on previous occasions, she wanted none of it.

“I feel great!” she crowed. “No more burning the midnight oil, no more nightmares. I’m liberated!”

Number 3 didn’t look so relieved. She had been sent home to write a
biao tai
—a statement of belief, repeating the government’s policies—to make her position known in the new movement. I watched over her shoulder as she crossed out and revised her statement.

“I’d love to help, Ah Sei, but I have no idea what to suggest.” I guess I didn’t sound too sympathetic.

“Wait till it’s your turn,” she retorted.

Great-Aunt, too, was parroting new political terms, such as “a revolution that touches everyone’s innermost being and purifies people’s thinking.” I laughed at her, for she clearly did not understand what she was saying.

We did not know it, but the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had begun.

1.
Although we called her Great-Aunt, she was not a blood relation. She had been taken into my grandfather Ye’s household as an unpaid live-in maid when in her twenties, after being twice widowed. When my father set up his home in Shanghai, Great-Aunt was sent along to keep house for him.

2.
In 1956 the government began its nationalization program: the forced confiscation of all private businesses.

3.
The neighbourhood committee is the lowest level of government organization. It puts government regulations into effect at “street level,” for example, distribution of food and coal coupons, or administration of welfare payments.

4.
In China, middle school is divided into junior (grades 7–9) and senior (grades 10–12).

5.
Every organization or work unit (called a
dan wei)
in China—school, factory, the government itself—had an administrative head and a Party Secretary. All policies and decisions required the Secretary’s approval. He or she was responsible for applying the Party’s programs.

CHAPTER TWO

“S
uspend classes to make revolution!” was the first
da-zi-bao
—big character poster—I saw as soon as I walked through the front gate of my school the next morning.
⁶
I had left my school bag and lunch at home because there would be no classes and the steam room where our rice was cooked for us would not be operating. A second poster read, “Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” Each black character on the blood-red paper was as tall as me.

Day after boring day our teachers read aloud to us government documents and newspaper editorials, which local and national papers were churning out with tedious regularity. This was the Party’s method of spreading information about new policies and condemning or praising political figures, most of whom I had never heard of. Sometimes the teacher had us stand and read one paragraph each—a good method of keeping us awake. Soon we all sounded like Great-Aunt, spouting slogans and terms we didn’t understand.

Like the other girls, I just went through the motions. This was not the first “movement” we had been forced to participate in: a few days short of fourteen years old, I was already a veteran. China—and our personal lives—fell under the control of the Communist Party. There was only one political party anyway, and Chairman Mao was the leader and ruled with an iron fist. Government officials were not elected by the people. Policies were forced on us through “campaigns.” We all assumed that this latest campaign was directed mainly at people working in the Arts—those who, in Great-Aunt’s words, “drink ink and play with pens.” We thought it would be over in a few months; instead, it was to rage for ten years.

One morning I heard the school’s loudspeakers blasting long before I entered the gate. “Fellow comrades, wield your pens as swords and spears and aim your words like bullets against the reactionaries.” A reactionary was anyone who opposed the Party and government. “Go to collect your weapons at the main office.”

The office had been turned into a storehouse stacked with giant sheets of coloured paper, boxes of bottled ink and writing brushes of all sizes. In one corner, Old Uncle Zhang, the gatekeeper, was making glue in a wooden barrel to paste up the posters. His forehead shone with sweat and his shirt clung
to his back. A chattering human stream flowed through the room, picking up supplies for the writing
of da-zi-bao
and
xiao-zi-bao
—the second being small character posters written with pen rather than brush.

I left with a bottle of ink, two brushes and a sheaf of red paper under my arm. At the foot of the stairs leading to my classroom, two freshly hung posters, the ink still running, caught my eye. “Rebellion is justified!” screamed the first. The second filled me with confusion and dread: “If Lin Guang-min does not surrender, we will destroy him!” The three characters of our principal’s name had been crossed over with Xs. Years before I had seen many caricatures of John F. Kennedy—whose name was transcribed into Chinese as
ken-ni-di
—chew the dirt floor. On those posters, each character in Kennedy’s name had been over-written with an X to show he was an enemy.

I stood transfixed. Principal Lin, in his late fifties, was well respected by the teachers and students, a man who would “check the ground before taking a step, for fear of crushing an ant,” as my geography teacher put it. What had he done to justify such extreme disrespect?

Shaken and confused, I spent the rest of the day filling my large red sheet with pointless slogans. While I was gluing my poster up on a brick wall I noticed that some of those already hung accused Principal Lin of “using ancient things to make fun of the present” in his history classes. Most of them were signed by “Revolutionary Soldiers,” even though pupils had written them.

The next day I found my previous day’s labour plastered over with new and more aggressive posters. I had never seen the students in such high spirits: no classes, no school, no homework and, most of all, free to criticize teachers, an unprecedented event since the time of Confucius, who had emphasized that teachers should always be treated with honour and respect.

The colourful posters attacked teachers for giving low marks or for writing critical remarks on report cards, and some exposed their private lives through gossip and rumour. One related that a pretty young math teacher, Yao, had shared a boiled egg with a bachelor teacher, Meng. Yao ate only the yolk and Meng finished the rest. They were openly addressed as “Teacher Yolk” and “Teacher Egg-white” by the students. Another poster disclosed that the only son of Teacher Zhu, my first-year English instructor, was adopted. The cruelty and meanness of this gossip was enormous. Adopting someone in your extended family was not uncommon in China, but adoption from outside was widely considered “fetching water with a bamboo-woven basket”—a futile effort—owing to traditional attitudes toward blood lineage. As a result, adoptive parents never revealed the truth to the child and would often move to another neighbourhood, even change jobs if possible, to keep the secret.

Not content with this, the poster writer also accused Teacher Zhu of refusing to have her own child out of vanity, “concerned that bearing a child will destroy her figure”—a rotten bourgeois way of thinking. I saw my former teacher standing in front of
the poster, vainly trying to explain to the girls surrounding her that the charge was untrue. She could not have children, she said. She would show them her medical records.

Unable to bear seeing her degradation, and sensing that no matter what she said, no one would listen to her, I stole away. All the way home I wished I could take back the unkind thoughts I had had about her when she gave me a low mark on my assignment. What will come next? I wondered. Whose turn will it be?

I arrived at school late the following day to find a circle of screaming girls surrounding Teacher Zhu near the auditorium. Pale and exhausted, she stood with her narrow shoulders hunched and her head down. The sight sickened and terrified me.

“What did you mean,” someone shouted, “when you taught us that ‘Long live Chairman Mao’ means ‘Chairman Mao lives long’?” It was one of my own classmates, Tang, nicknamed “Super Flat” because of the unusual flatness of her head and face. In two years I had never heard her utter a word in class. Now here she was attacking our teacher over a point of grammar. None of us had been able to understand how to translate “Long live Chairman Mao” because we had not yet studied the subjunctive mood, so Teacher Zhu had suggested that for the time being we take it as “Chairman Mao lives long.”

“We all wish that Chairman Mao will live forever, but you said he just lives for a long time,” my classmate shrieked. “How long did you have in mind? What was your real purpose? Confess!”

The girls immediately broke into a chant.
“Wan-shou-wu-jiang! Wan-shou-wu-jiang!
—May our great leader Chairman Mao live forever!” They waved a little book as they chased my teacher across the schoolyard.

I realized that almost everyone had a red book except me, and, frightened by the attack on Teacher Zhu, I figured I’d better get one quickly. I headed for the main office, where two students sat behind a desk piled high with plastic covered volumes with
Quotations of Chairman Mao
embossed on the red plastic cover. I gave them my name and grade.

“What is your class background?” the heaviest of the two demanded.

All the political turmoil that had swirled through my school, all the personal attacks on teachers, should have made me more careful, but I was still naive. I answered.

“Zi-chan-jie-ji
—capitalist class.”

“Then you don’t deserve one,” came the angry reply. “The red treasure books are for students who are from the Five Reds, not for your stinking shitty class, who exploit the workers!”

In the files kept by the police on everyone, the most important item of information was your social “class.” People who were peasants or workers like Great-Aunt were good; landlords or business owners were bad. Because my grandfather Ye had once owned land and my father had owned a factory, my family was classified as capitalist, even though Father’s business was gone.

I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked around for a teacher to help or at least tell me what was going on, but none was in sight. What were the Five Reds? All I knew was that red
meant good and black was bad. What could they mean calling me an exploiter and member of a shitty class? My family was poor and I was living on welfare. I felt the tears sting my eyes, but refused to let them out.

“You don’t need to insult me,” I said. “If you don’t want to give me the book, I’ll be fine without it.” And I ran from the office and out of the school. When I got home I broke down. I had thought that I would never cry like that again, never after my parents died. Great-Aunt listened without interruption, then went to her dresser and returned with a red book in her hand.

“Ah Si, take mine,” she offered. “When the neighbourhood committee gave it to me I didn’t know what it was. All I can recognize is the portrait of Chairman Mao.”

“You don’t understand!” I shot back. “I’m not crying because I don’t have this book. It’s the insult. I don’t deserve to be degraded like that. Calling me ‘shit’!” I threw down her book and stormed out of the room.

As if I was not upset enough, Number 3 came home with a copy of the red book. When I retold my tale of woe, she burst out laughing, saying I was “brainless” and lacked “flexible thinking.”

“Why did you tell them the truth?” she sneered. “Did you think they would bother to check? These books come by the truckload! I told them I am a daughter of an office clerk, not totally untrue. Father did work in an office and did clerical and accounting work, didn’t he? It all depends on your point of view. Smarten up, Ah Si!”