China in Ten Words (9 page)

This was when the Huang Shuai incident was making headlines all over the country. Huang Shuai, a twelve-year-old, had criticized a teacher in her diary. She wrote:

Today XX did not observe classroom protocol and caused some disruption. Teacher called him to the front. “I really feel like giving you a good whack on the head with my pointer,” he told him. That’s not the right thing to say, is it? A pointer is to be used for teaching purposes, not to hit pupils over the head with. I hope you will patiently correct students if they make mistakes and be more careful about what you say in the future.

When the teacher saw the diary, he hit the roof, convinced the girl was bent on undermining his authority. In the weeks that followed he subjected Huang Shuai to constant criticism and told her classmates they should have nothing to do with her. Lonely and forlorn, she resorted to writing a two-page letter to the
Beijing Daily
. She protested:

I am a junior Red Guard who loves the party and Chairman Mao. All I did was write what I thought in my diary, but the teacher just won’t let it go. For so many days now I have been unable to eat, and when I try to sleep, I have nightmares that make me cry. Just what is this terrible mistake I have committed? Surely we young people in the age of Mao Zedong can’t be expected to be slaves to the oppressive old educational system with its notions of “teacher’s dignity”!

In mid-December 1973 the
Beijing Daily
published Huang Shuai’s letter and excerpts from her diary. Later that month the
People’s Daily
reprinted the whole article as the top lead on the front page, adding an editorial comment for good measure. The Central People’s Broadcasting Service reported the story, too. Huang Shuai was a celebrity for a time, an anti-establishment hero and role model to students all over the country. But good times don’t last. Three years later, with the death of Mao and the fall of Madame Mao and her cronies, Huang Shuai fell from heaven into hell, labeled at sixteen a lackey of the Gang of Four.
^†
Big-character posters criticizing her sprouted up everywhere, and her parents came to grief as well. Her mother wrote a long self-denunciation, and her father was arrested, emerging with his name cleared only in 1981. In that era, destiny did not rest in one’s own hands; everyone found himself swept along in the current, and nobody knew whether fortune or fiasco lay ahead.

In late 1973, as the campaign to criticize “teacher’s dignity” swept through Chinese schools, the big-character posters I wrote under the name of Spring Shoots caused quite a stir in my school and I enjoyed a fleeting reputation as a “red pen.” Red being the color of revolution and black the color of counterrevolution, a “red pen” was a politically correct author, in contradistinction to the “black pen,” purveyor of politically suspect works.

Three classmates and I wielded our brushes energetically in round-the-clock writing sessions, copying revolutionary phrases verbatim from the
People’s Daily, Zhejiang Daily
, and Shanghai’s
Liberation Daily
. Before the week was out we had completed close to forty big-character posters, which we plastered over the walls of our school. In them we fiercely criticized every member of the teaching staff, with one exception: the teacher of Chinese, with whom I had quite a good relationship. He would often slip me a cigarette, and every time I swiped a few cigs from my father I would make sure to repay his generosity.

In those days the working class was the leader in all things, and in every work unit (except for factories, military bases, and rural villages) a workers’ propaganda team had been installed. When one of these teams moved into our school, its leader became, in effect, the top administrator. He was a worker in his fifties, and as he perused our posters he scribbled away in his notebook and greeted me with a smile. “Good job! Good job!” he enthused.

Little did I realize that those forty posters our Spring Shoots group had cooked up served to bolster his revolutionary credentials. The chairman of the county revolutionary committee heaped praise on him, declaring that our school was in the top rank of schools in our county in its dedication to the movement to emulate Huang Shuai’s anti-establishment spirit and critique teacher’s dignity and might indeed be among the top schools in the entire province.

The workers’-propaganda team leader earnestly recorded the names of all the teachers we had criticized, only to discover that the teacher of Chinese had been overlooked. He was not at all happy about that, for this revealed a blind spot in the campaign. He summoned the blind spot to his office and there banged on the desk and burst into a stream of expletives, expounding his belief that the only thing that could possibly explain the absence of criticism was that this blind spot was oppressing and mistreating his students.

Our teacher sought me out, grim-faced. He led me to a secluded corner beyond the school walls and handed me a cigarette, which he lit with a match. “Why didn’t you write a poster about me?” he asked plaintively.

I sucked on my cigarette. “You’ve got no shred of teacher’s dignity,” I told him.

“How can that be?” He became agitated. “Teacher’s dignity—I’m dignified from head to toe!”

“You’re always giving us cigarettes,” I objected. “You treat us on an equal basis. I don’t see that you have any teacher’s dignity at all.”

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and had no choice but to tell me about his harrowing interview with the propaganda team leader. Now I understood. I promised I’d get a poster criticizing him done that very evening and he’d see it as soon he got up in the morning.

I was as good as my word. After dinner I summoned my writing-group partners, and we wrote away in the classroom until late that night. We had allotted one poster each to the other instructors, but we went one better with the teacher of Chinese and wrote two full posters about him. Then, clutching the posters, we went to his home, and as he slept soundly inside we conferred about where to stick them up. Originally I thought we would stick them to his door, but there wasn’t room there for both of them, so the best we could do was post one on each side.

The following morning the teacher ushered me once more to a quiet spot outside the school—not to thank me, as I was expecting, but to lodge a complaint. I shouldn’t have stuck the posters outside his door, he said, for the propaganda team leader would never see them there, and they would just make him a laughingstock among the neighbors. Much better to stick a poster up right outside the team leader’s office. Seeing me nod, he raised another sore point: why did I have to write two posters about him when one was good enough for the others? Well, that was to elevate him to a higher category, I told him.

“No, no, I don’t want to be higher than anyone else,” he said. “Equal treatment—that’s all I want.”

“All right, then,” I agreed. “We’ll go the extra mile and write a new poster for you.”

“What about the ones outside my door?” he asked.

“Just tear them down when you get home.”

“How could I dare do that?” the teacher practically howled. “You come take them down yourself,” he whispered.

Then he coached me on what to say when I came at lunchtime to carry out this mission. I nodded and reassured him that everything would be done just as he instructed. He groped around in his pocket, brought out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and handed me one. He took a few steps, then stopped, turned around, and gave me the rest of the pack.

As promised, I finished writing the poster before the end of the morning session and posted it outside the team leader’s office. Then my associates and I marched over to the teacher’s house, shouting his name outside his door. He deliberately lingered inside and failed to emerge, and only after the neighbors had rushed out to watch the excitement did he venture forth, bowing and scraping. “Listen up!” I scolded. “We’ve written another poster about your teacher’s dignity, an even more powerful critique than these two here, and we put it up in the school. Go and read it right away!”

He trotted off obediently toward the school. We made a great show of tearing down the posters outside his house, explaining to the neighbors that they lacked sufficient depth, not like the newly written poster stuck up in the school, which we welcomed them to read.

In my final years in high school I continued to write, but I suddenly lost interest in big-character posters. Instead I tried writing a play, which I suppose counts as my first literary work. I must have spent the best part of one semester writing a one-act play, about nine or ten pages long. I revised it several times, then copied it out carefully onto squared writing paper. Its subject matter was very popular at the time: a landlord, having seen all his property confiscated after Liberation, was bitterly resentful and tried to sabotage socialist reconstruction in the countryside but was caught in the act by the clever and resourceful poor and lower-middle peasants.

In our town there lived a well-known red pen, quite a bit older than me, who had made a name for himself by publishing a great many poems and essays extolling the Cultural Revolution in the mimeographed magazine of the local cultural center. Through a classmate’s good offices I managed to make the acquaintance of this small-town celebrity, and I respectfully presented him with a copy of my play and invited his comments.

A few days later, when I went to visit him for the second time, he had read my play and had also written a lengthy paragraph of comments in red ink on the final page. He returned the manuscript to me with a very self-important air. I’d find his comments at the end, he said, and there was nothing much to add, except for one point he wanted to emphasize: there was no psychology in my play—no soliloquies, in other words. Soliloquies, he informed me, were the sine qua non of playwriting.

I was about to take my leave when he brought out a three-act play that he had recently completed. It dealt with the same kind of story as my own: a landlord bent on sabotage, only to be apprehended by poor and lower-middle peasants. As he thrust the bulky manuscript into my hands he asked me to pay special attention to how he handled soliloquies. “Particularly the landlord’s soliloquies,” he preened. “They’re so graphic.”

I carried both manuscripts home. First I carefully read his comments on my play. They were all criticisms, basically, apart from a few words of praise at the end, when he said I wrote smoothly enough. Then I carefully read his play. I couldn’t see what was so great about it either; those landlord’s soliloquies of which he was so proud were merely formulaic phrases in which the landlord talked about how he intended to wreak havoc on socialism, and the graphic language consisted simply of some dirty words with which his remarks were interlarded. Such were the standard conventions of the time: workers and peasants never used swearwords; bad language was the preserve of landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries. I felt, nonetheless, that I ought to compliment him, for he was somebody of considerable stature in our town. I paid him a reciprocal courtesy, fetching a red pen and writing a long paragraph of comments in the blank space on the final page. My comments were basically all favorable, and I waxed especially lyrical when it came to the landlord’s soliloquies, which I praised to the skies, saying that such brilliant writing really had no match in the world. Only at the very end did I add a criticism to the effect that the organization was a bit loose.

When I returned his manuscript, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was looking forward to my puffery and adulation. I made a number of flattering remarks that made him chuckle. Then suddenly he was in a fury—he had noticed my commentary on the last page. “You dare to write something on my manuscript?” he roared.

I was taken by surprise, never having imagined that my reciprocity would provoke such anger. “You wrote on my manuscript, too,” I protested timidly.

“What the fuck!” he shouted. “Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am?”

He had a point. He was a name and I was a nobody. Seeing the criticism that ended my commentary, he flew into a towering rage. “You’re way too big for your boots!” he cried, giving me a kick. “You have the gall to tell me the organization is loose?”

I hurriedly retreated a couple of paces and pointed out that there were many respectful comments as well. He bent his head to read more closely, and when he saw how I fawned over his landlord’s soliloquies, his anger visibly subsided. He sat down in a chair and had me sit down, too. After reading my comments through from start to finish, he seemed to recover his composure. He did, however, start grumbling that my having written in red pen made it impossible to give the script to anybody else to read. I suggested he tear out the last page and rewrite the ending on a new sheet of paper—I even offered to do the recopying. He waved his hand to decline. “Forget it, I’ll do it myself.”

A smile of contentment began to appear on his face. Two officials from the cultural center had read his play, he confided, and they were tremendously impressed; there was a veritable flood of good reviews. I remained skeptical. How could the reaction of two people be called “a flood of good reviews,” I wondered. But I feigned delight nonetheless. The workers’-propaganda team leader at the county cultural center was currently reviewing the play, he went on. As soon as it was given the all-clear, the county Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team would start rehearsals; after five nights at the county playhouse the play would move to the provincial capital and compete in the Popular Arts Festival.

The small-town big shot’s complacency continued for a few more days before his career took a nosedive. The propaganda team leader at the cultural center was an uncultured boor whose education had ended at primary school. After reading the landlord’s soliloquies, he came to the conclusion that their author must be a counterrevolutionary bent on sabotaging socialist reconstruction. To him the landlord’s soliloquies were nothing more and nothing less than the author’s soliloquies.