The Incarnations (45 page)

Long March smirks. You have been her greatest rival for years, and your downfall is her triumphant rise. ‘Class Enemy Zhang Liya. You and your father were loyal running dogs of Liu Shaoqi and part of his conspiracy plot to overthrow Chairman Mao. Your crimes will be punished severely!’

You nod once more. ‘I understand.’

You don’t deny the accusations. You know the futility of denial. Your restraint and strength of character are remarkable. But the Red Guards will break you. And if they can’t break you with words, they will do it with knives.

‘We have also been informed of your loyalty to the Nationalist Party,’ Long March says. She nods at me, ‘Comrade Yi Moon, can you show us the evidence?’

For the first time since the Red Guards stormed your room, you look surprised. You stare at me in shock. I stare back coldly. I stamp out my guilt by remembering the humiliating terms of our ‘friendship’. How is this betrayal when there is no friendship to betray?

I go to your bed, reach for the screwdriver under the bedding and pry up the loose floorboard. I remove the cardboard box and turn your dead mother’s possessions out on to the floor. Long March pounces on the black and white photograph. She holds it up to her eyes and laughs in your mother’s lovely twenty-year-old face.

‘Who is this syphilis-ridden whore? Why does Zhang Liya have a picture of an ugly Nationalist-era prostitute under her floor?’

Your eyes are blank as Long March rips the photograph up and scatters the torn pieces over your chair.

‘Bring this loyal running dog of the Nationalists back to school!’ she commands. ‘Bring the poisonous weeds too!’

The Red Guards lunge for you. They force you into aeroplane position, wrenching your arms back and shoving your head forwards, and march you out. Other Red Guards start ransacking your room. Patriotic Hua holds up your mother’s scarlet and gold embroidered qipao. There is admiration in her eyes as she gazes at the shimmering silk. She strokes the fabric with her fingers, and the sensual pleasure of it softens her harsh face. Then she notices me watching her.

‘Who gave you permission to look at me, Stinking Rightist?’ Patriotic Hua snaps. ‘Take your beady little capitalist eyes off me!’

Long March, who is staring at the glamorous singer on the Hong Kong record sleeve, glances at me and says casually, ‘So you think you are one of the Red Guards now, Yi Moon? Don’t be so deluded. Go back to the black-category girls where you belong.’

They lock you up in Headteacher Yang’s former office. Red Guards go in and out, carrying water and food and the papers on which they have recorded your confession. Days and weeks go by, and I never once hear you scream or weep or beg. Your silence unnerves me more than the howls of the Cattle Shed. Your interrogator, Comrade Martial Spirit, prides herself on making class enemies scream. Screaming, she says, exorcizes the counter-revolutionary demons from the soul. Your silence will be seen as defiance. Your silence will provoke them to inflict even more pain.

Winter. The toilet block is unbearably cold and damp. I breathe out fog and shiver under the sinks, reading sheets of toilet paper. When the Red Guards came back to school, they ransacked the library, clearing the shelves of every book not authored by Chairman Mao. Most of the books were razed on a bonfire, but some were torn up for toilet paper, as ‘poisonous weeds’ are fit only for ‘wiping our backsides’. Though a sorry fate for literature, the sheets of toilet paper are my salvation during the bleak winter days, as I read
Journey to the West
,
Dream of the Red Chamber
and other banned volumes, escaping through the pages into illicit other worlds.

One day I am lost in the
Book of Odes
when footsteps approach the toilet block. Scared of being caught reading the Propaganda of the Capitalist Classes, I throw the toilet paper aside, grab a rag and pretend to be scrubbing the floor. Head down, on my knees, I scrub and wait for the unexpected visitor to go into a toilet stall. But the footsteps walk over to where I crouch instead. I look up.

‘
Liya?
’

You stand in the pallid winter light coming through the window. Your eyes are blackened and swollen, the lids welded shut. There are bald patches on your head and cuts on your legs seeping blood and pus. Your mother’s silk qipao hangs in shreds.

‘Liya,
is that you
?’

You breathe in shallow exhalations. ‘Who else . . . would be wearing this dress?’

The high-ranking Party official’s daughter is gone. They have persecuted the high status out of you. They have proved you are just like the rest of us, with hair that rips out and blood that leaves the body through wounds. I wince at the cuts on your legs. They need to be disinfected and stitched up at the hospital, or they won’t heal. I take a deep, shaky breath.

‘Liya,’ I say, ‘my mother has a bottle of iodine at home. I can run home and bring it for you . . .’

‘Don’t bring me iodine, Moon . . . Or I will report you for collaborating with a class enemy.’

You smile bleakly. Are you joking? I can’t tell from your empty gaze. They have persecuted the life out of your eyes.

‘But your wounds are infected . . .’

You say nothing to this, seeming not to care about your limbs rotting away.

‘How did you get out of Headteacher Yang’s office?’ I ask. ‘Have the Red Guards released you?’

You hold up your clenched fist. There’s a toothbrush in its grip. ‘Reporting for duty, Comrade Yi,’ you say. ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’

The sight of the toothbrush is so pitiful I start to cry. Is this what I hoped for when I led the Red Guards to the box hidden under your floorboard? For you to be beaten until your head swelled black and blue? For your hair to be dragged out at the roots, leaving your scalp bleeding and bare?

‘I am sorry I betrayed you . . .’ I whisper.

You stare back, unmoved. ‘My father was expelled from the Party and imprisoned for counter-revolutionary crimes,’ you state flatly. ‘They would have tortured me anyway.’

Pipes leak and drip on to the cement floor. In the distance is the chanting of a denunciation rally. A teenage girl shrieks hysterically into a loudspeaker. The sound is exhausting to me.

‘I don’t blame you, Yi Moon . . .’ you say. ‘I looked the other way when they persecuted you . . .’

‘You stopped the Red Guards from raiding our home!’

‘I could have done more, but I didn’t want to risk my status . . . I was a bad friend . . . I deserve your hate.’

I go and put my arms around you. ‘I’ve never hated you,’ I whisper.

I breathe in your rankness and the septic odour of your wounds. They have been starving you, and you are thin as a stalk of bamboo.

‘Yi Moon . . .’ your voice is a low mosquito hum in my ear ‘. . . I need your help . . .’ You move out of my embrace. You press a hard, smooth, metal object into my hand. I look down. A penknife. ‘I stole it when Martial Spirit wasn’t looking,’ you say. ‘Don’t worry. She won’t miss it. She has plenty of knives.’

My heart beats faster. I stare at the penknife and fear shunts my chest, knocking the air out of my lungs. I stare at you, bleeding, bruised and paler than the dead. But behind their swollen lids, your eyes are burning and intense. Brought back to life by your will to die.

‘Why me?’

‘My wrist is broken. A couple of my fingers are too. I don’t have the strength . . .’

I turn the penknife over and click out the blade. Short, but brutal and sharp. I imagine it cutting your wrist. Slicing through skin, blood vessels and tendons. I shudder and retract it again.

‘Liya,’ I say carefully, ‘the Cultural Revolution will be over in a few months, just like the Anti-rightist campaign was. Your father will be released from prison and rehabilitated. Your wounds will heal. Life will get better.’

‘My father won’t be released from prison,’ you say. ‘He died there yesterday.’

‘
Oh
. . .’

‘I deserve to die, Yi Moon. I am a murderer. During the home raids I kicked people to death. I dragged a woman by a dog’s leash around her neck until she was strangled dead. I gouged the eyes out of a dead man’s head and crushed them in my bare hands.’

What you say is sickening and can’t be true. But I look into your eyes, and know you are not lying. I say weakly, ‘All the Red Guards have blood on their hands . . .’

‘Then we all deserve to die.’

‘I can’t do it, Liya.’

‘You
can
.’ You go down on your knees on the damp cement. You hold out your thin, blue-veined wrists. You look up at me from this begging posture, your bruised eyes pleading with mine. ‘You
can
. . .’

You lift your wrists higher, baring them for the blade. Your arms are shaking from the exertion, and tears sting my eyes, because I know then that I will do it. I will do it out of mercy, because it is the most humane thing to do. I will do it out of love.

My breath shuddering, I reach for your left hand. I click out the blade and slash your inner wrist as hard as I can. You gasp, and your eyes go wide. I let your hand go, and we both stare as the thin line of red widens and drips, the cement darkening as your blood escapes. You breathe in sharp intakes of breath.

‘The other one,’ you say. ‘Hurry.’

You hold out the other wrist, and I reach for it and slash again. This time you don’t gasp. This time you turn your head up, as though to God in Heaven, and yell, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’

You crawl to a metal bucket of stagnant water and plunge your wrists in. As you crouch there I want to rip my shirt up for tourniquets, to staunch death’s flow. But I betrayed you once. I can’t betray you again.

When you lose consciousness, you slump and the bucket capsizes, spilling a tide of red across the floor. I kneel over you and the mess of your wrists. You have stopped bleeding. Your heart has stopped beating.

‘Sorry,’ I hear myself sob. ‘Sorry.’

In the distance, a teenage girl shrieks through a loudspeaker and hundreds of schoolgirls chant. I touch my fingers to your bruised and battered face.
I deserve to die, Yi Moon. I am a murderer
, you said. Now I am a murderer too, and cannot live with my conscience either.

The knife is within reaching distance. I grasp the handle before I lose my nerve, and turn the blade on my own wrists. Once. Twice. Shock numbs the pain. Struggling for breath, I lay down beside you and hold your hand. There’s a roaring in my head. The roaring of our Great Helmsman, furious that I have betrayed him. The roaring of the masses, furious that I have taken my fate in my own hands. Then there is silence, darkness and reprieve.

UNFORTUNATELY, I DID
not die. I woke in a hospital bed, my head throbbing, and my wrists aching beneath thick bandages. When she saw I was awake, the patient in the next bed yelled for the nurses, who rushed to my bedside and started chanting, ‘Down with Yi Moon! Down with Yi Moon!’ Big-character Posters condemning my suicide attempt covered the walls. I saw one that said,
The Masses Rejoice in the Death of the Counterrevolutionary Zhang Liya
. And I was relieved that you were spared the persecution I was about to suffer.

I went back to school with my bandaged wrists and spent the first months of 1967 on the brink of another suicide attempt. Then the Red Guards of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls split up into rival factions; one headed by Comrade Dare to Rebel, the other by Comrade Martial Spirit, and, caught up in the civil war, they neglected the black-category students entirely. When I stopped going to school, none of the Red Guards bothered to come and get me. So every day I stayed at home with my mother and waited to see what the Party had in store for us next.

A year later I was sent to Repair the Earth in the countryside. My mother came to see me off at Beijing railway station. She gave me a box of rice and vegetables prepared for the long journey to Heilongjiang and wept as she hugged me goodbye.

‘Be revolutionary!’ she urged. ‘Love Chairman Mao and the Great, Glorious and Correct Communist Party with all your heart!’

By then I had lost my faith in Communism and willed the Great Helmsman dead, but I smiled and promised my mother I would. The train of Sent-down Youth pulled away from the platform and the crowds of parents wailed to be losing their children to the Great Northern Waste. My waving mother receded into the distance and I started to cry. I had a premonition that I would never see her again.

The train journey was forty-seven hours long and every carriage was crowded with Sent-down Youth, excited to be going ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages’ to be educated by the peasants. They sang jubilant revolutionary songs all the way to Heilongjiang. The train moved us further into exile, and the Beijing students chorused, ‘I’ll Go Where Chairman Mao’s Finger Points!’ and ‘Long Live our Sickles!’ in joy.

I was one of twelve Sent-down Youths sent to Three Ox Village, a few tumbledown shacks a six-hour hike from the town of Langxiang. During the day we laboured in the sorghum fields with the peasants, the wind and rain lashing away our youth. At night we slept in a barn so cold our tears of homesickness froze on our cheeks. The idealistic Beijing students organized political classes for the peasants of Three Ox Village and meetings for ‘Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by the Evil Landlords of the Pre-liberation Era’. Unfortunately, the illiterate villagers, far away from the sloganeering of the
People’s Daily
, had not learnt the correct political script. The hardships they recalled – the deaths from starvation, the corrupt Party officials and crippling taxes – were from Mao Zedong’s era. The Beijing students were shocked by the ignorance and backwardness of the villagers and the extent of political re-education they needed. But as the Educated Youth slowly came to understand the real reason they had been exiled in the Great Northern Waste – that the ‘rebellious youth’ had served their political ends and Repairing the Earth was the Party’s way of getting rid of us – the curriculum planned for Three Ox Village was abandoned. Consumed by hopelessness and loss of faith, the Sent-down Youth went through a re-education of their own.