Forbidden City, page 28
Reports had indicated that students believed the campus was overrun with capitalists, and I’d seen for myself how they’d attack anyone they thought undermined the Chairman. Students had been searching for threats everywhere, the couriers had said, in novels, newspapers, and movies, finding threatening signs and symbols wherever they looked.
The Chairman hadn’t expected, hadn’t counted on the extent of the student involvement. I’d tell him how the crowds offered safety in numbers. The collective offered courage, strength—and anonymity. None of the students strutting around me wanted to be the first to back down, no different in a school walkway than on a battlefield.
When the President pushed back against the students, they grew more frenzied, just as we’d wanted, just as we’d planned. After what I had seen so far, I felt like I’d gulped down ten shots of maotai—giddy but also queasy about what I’d set into motion.
After we agreed to meet back at the sedan in an hour, I slipped into a nearby group, a few students clustered around a poster. If they asked, I’d go by Dong Feng, the East Wind, a name they’d believe fit for a model revolutionary.
I wondered if I could pass muster as a student. I’d fooled the President, but what would they see? If they realized I wasn’t a student, would they turn against me as quickly as those Red Guard at the factory?
A teenage boy tapped on a wrinkled poster about the President’s cadre. “They call the students counter-revolutionary?” he spat. His inflamed, pimply skin reminded me of lumps of tofu swimming in chili sauce. “Nonsense!”
The others gathered nodded.
“They don’t intimidate us,” said a girl whose thick glasses magnified her eyes, giving her the look of a frog. “We’d rather die than submit to their lies.”
“I heard that some of the work teams aren’t cadre at all,” the boy said. The President’s cadre collaborated in what were known as work teams. “They’re thugs who got released from jail, to shut us up once and for all.”
“Don’t let rumors distract you from the real enemy!” the girl answered.
He gave her a wary look. The other students eyed her, too. I wondered if they knew one another, or if students were always trying to get the better of one another. If you didn’t seem revolutionary enough, maybe you risked getting blamed.
She pointed at a poster about a student who had killed herself by jumping in front of the train. Cadre had accused her of trying to overturn the revolution. “Her blood is on the President’s hands.”
He bobbed his head. “He all but pushed her!”
Neither of them seemed nervous saying what amounted to treason. Blaming the President wasn’t new to them. How quickly would a rumor spread? If they hated the President so much, I could come up with gossip of my own. But what? The Chairman had implied the President had certain appetites, and he might be capable of what I claimed—maybe only once, but one too many times.
“I heard he went after a fifteen-year-old girl,” I blurted. “A friend of his daughter’s. After a party at their house.”
“Who told you that?” the girl said, sizing me up. My uniform was in better shape than hers, which was moth-eaten at the shoulders, baggy on her wiry frame.
“Garbage talk,” the boy proclaimed, with the authority and flash of a cleaver.
He couldn’t dismiss me like that! “Call it what you want, but it’s true,” I said.
“What happened to her?” the girl asked.
“She killed herself,” I said.
Her face crumpled, and she blinked away tears. She seemed so devastated, I should take it back. And yet, I could see something else in her, in all the students crowded around the poster—a shiftiness born from an itch to spread a rumor.
“I heard she was thirteen,” the boy said, as if a moment ago he hadn’t called me a liar. He wanted to claim authority, and I sensed then how my lies, everyone’s lies, could spin out of control, joining other people’s exaggerations, unpredictable as marbles tumbling across the floor.
“I…” I trailed off. I didn’t want to admit I’d been lying. I peeked at Secretary Sun, who was reading a poster on the side of a brick building a dozen meters away.
The group noticed him. “He looks like a spy!” the girl said. “He could be a cadre in disguise, pretending to be a Red Guard.”
“He could be a convict!” the boy added.
For a few seconds, the girl let slip her fear. Then she squinted with such a fury I thought if I didn’t stop her, she might push Secretary Sun onto the ground. She marched toward him. She would have been a toddler at the time of Liberation; I’d been a baby a couple weeks old. We’d missed the glory of the revolution, but our time was coming.
I grabbed her arm. “Shouldn’t we watch him first? Spy on the spy?”
“Spies!” the boy said. “You think I wouldn’t know about this? Nothing happens here without my knowledge. The No. 1 Red Brigade leads the way.”
The girl frowned. “The No. 1 Red Light Brigade will defeat every enemy.”
The No. 1 Red Light Brigade and the No. 1 Red Brigade. Their names were so close. Was she talking about the same brigade, or had they run out of revolutionary names?
The way they glared at each other made me suspect they had to be rivals. In a country of hundreds of millions, we couldn’t all be No. 1. Yet no one ever dreamed of being in the middle.
When the girl stalked off, the boy yanked her braid.
“Wah!” the girl shouted.
Shaking free of him, she shoved him in the chest with both hands. I backed away from the wall, along with the others trying to get out of the way. He seized me by my shoulders. “You, I’ve never seen you.” I knew his kind: Too young for a wife, he still needed the care of his mother. When he fell short in his struggle to become a man, his rage would follow.
“Maybe she’s the spy,” the girl said.
“I—” When I hesitated, he squeezed my shoulders until it felt like my bones ground together. The rest of the group had retreated a few meters away. I looked around the plaza, hoping that someone might stop him, but everyone seemed caught up in their own quarrels.
Secretary Sun hurried over. In a moment, he’d pull us apart. In a moment, he’d send me back to the Chairman. I had to make up a story: I was in high school, I said to him. “I had to come; I’ve heard so much about what you’re doing here.”
Flattered, the boy let go of me.
“Little Sister, be careful,” the girl said. She cut her eyes at him. “Don’t trust paper tigers.”
He frowned as she invited me to her brigade’s meeting at the library, later that afternoon. “All talk,” he said. In an hour, he bragged, he could bring me to a struggle session, attacking an economics professor with capitalist leanings.
“I’ll take you to a cowshed,” she countered. The nickname for the makeshift prisons in classrooms and dormitories. “I know the guard on duty. He’ll let you look through the window. The way they beg to get out—it’s pathetic.”
Sweat dripped down my back, the sun making me feel woozy. I tried to move away, but I was caught between them—like a rag that a pair of dogs would sooner shred than let the other have. Secretary Sun lingered nearby in front of another poster, other students milling around him. In the time since we’d arrived, the crowd in the plaza had thickened, the lines around the posters five deep.
I told them that I was meeting a friend. As I walked away from the plaza, past classrooms and deeper into the campus, Secretary Sun fell into step with me.
“All right?” he asked.
“Melon-headed idiots. They’re supposed to lead us?”
“They’re more destructive than they seem,” he said. A pair of ducks glided along the shore.
“To his enemies? To themselves!” I kicked aside a fallen pine cone. “Who needs the cadre to suppress the students? Set them against each other!”
“The infighting isn’t new. It’s part of every revolution,” he said.
He had a point: The students still had many of the Chairman’s enemies on guard—on the run. And yet, if the Chairman wanted the Cultural Revolution to go on, he would have to find another way to dazzle those who doubted him. He’d been in seclusion for so long, fading from their present, but he had to appear to be as vital, as invincible as ever. Yet another appearance from high above Tiananmen, another speech crackling over the radio, or a gleaming portrait in every village wouldn’t do.
* * *
—
In my week away, I talked to scores of Red Guard on dozens of campuses in the capital and witnessed struggle sessions, sometimes two or three times a day, in abandoned classrooms or in the plaza. Sometimes, if the victims groveled enough, they left the struggle sessions humiliated but unharmed; it depended on the whims of the students. The punishments became increasingly violent and warped, like a weird echo that grows louder, not softer, with each repetition.
The most terrifying afternoon I witnessed began when a Red Guard shaved a portly university official’s head at the front of a large lecture hall. He was the highest-ranking administrator the students had gone after so far on my visit, and I wanted to include him in my report to the Chairman. I scanned the crowd—three dozen students or so along the walls and the aisles—and was relieved that the Red Guards who’d quarreled with me weren’t among them.
“Tell the President he’s next!” a girl shouted at the man, now bald and weeping.
Articles denouncing his allies had begun appearing in newspapers and magazines. Radio broadcasters read the accusations aloud, people shared them at meetings and posted them at crowded intersections. What you might settle with your fists in the village, here you could lay out in words, with the power to humiliate your opponent across the entire country.
I pressed myself against the wall as the students paraded the university official toward the door. Blood trickled from cuts on his freshly shorn scalp, one rivulet dripping into his eye that the man couldn’t wipe away because his arms were pinned behind his back. He wheezed, wild-eyed as someone drowning. A dark stain spread across his crotch.
I was surprised at how personal their hatred seemed, as if the President and his proxies had slapped them, spit on them. As if he himself might come at them with a knife around the next corner.
The Red Guard was shorter than the official, the top of her head at his chin. With a shriek, she splashed ink into his eyes. He didn’t blink. He must have sunk deep inside himself; otherwise, he wouldn’t last the day.
Secretary Sun remained behind with me as everyone else left. We would have to follow them, but I had to gather myself first. The more I witnessed, the less certain I felt about what to tell the Chairman. I didn’t know how to convince him to return to the capital.
“They act like the President is out to get them. As if any of them matter that much,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“It’s not about what the President did to them, or might do to them,” he said. “The man they marched out of here? He shut down a cheating ring a few months ago.”
“They’re getting revenge?” I asked. Outside, the students jeered. “But is he guilty of what they said? Is he a secret capitalist?”
“Guilty enough,” Secretary Sun said. “We’re all guilty of not doing enough for the revolution. But yes, people are settling grudges now. Years and years of them.”
“Then there’s no end to it,” I murmured. “What happens when the Chairman wants it to stop?”
Secretary Sun didn’t answer.
“We have to tell him,” I said. The students had written slogans on the chalkboard, on top of faint math equations that they couldn’t completely erase, from classes canceled weeks ago.
“He’s been told,” he said.
I leaned against the wall, wanting to slide down to the floor. The smell of burning wafted through the shattered window, and glass littered the floor beside an overturned desk.
“If they’re this angry, what if they turn on the Chairman?” I asked.
“Have you heard anything like that?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You won’t,” he said.
“You don’t know that!” I said. Chanting began.
“In all your life, did you or your family ever blame the Chairman for anything?” It was as if he’d asked if we would ever consider carving off our faces.
“A girl was saying that the President must have done something to the Chairman,” I said. “How the Chairman hadn’t been seen in months. Her friend disagreed, but the girl insisted, asking, ‘Why haven’t we seen his photo in the newspaper? Why hasn’t he been on the radio?’ ”
“I’ve heard that rumor, too,” he said.
“Shouldn’t the Chairman do something?” I asked. “Make a public appearance?”
“He knows,” Secretary Sun said.
“The reports don’t really explain what it’s like here,” I said. “But I will.”
The suffering official bellowed incoherently. We ran to find him getting marched off toward the main plaza, which was already crowded with a competing commotion: a pair of students lugging a woman in a basket onto a stage. “Whore! Whore! Bourgeoisie whore!” they shouted.
Her long hair hung in her face, matted with blood. The stage was on the other end of the plaza but when I moved in for a closer look, Secretary Sun tugged on my arm. “They’re going that way.”
The Red Guard we’d been following had led the official in another direction. The sound of pelting started up, and I turned to see the crowd now hurling stones at the woman onstage. Most missed her, hitting the floorboards, but when one glanced off her shoulder, she didn’t flinch.
I faltered and would have tumbled to my knees if Secretary Sun hadn’t caught my arm. When I staggered toward her, he jerked me back and clapped a hand over my mouth.
I realized then I was screaming. “Stop! Stop!”
He released me after I went quiet.
“Don’t you want to see what happens to him? For your report to the Chairman?” he said, with a bitterness I didn’t yet understand.
My throat felt scraped, swollen. I’d been lucky; no one else had noticed. Why did I want to keep screaming then—for her, at her?
“There’s nothing here the Chairman hasn’t heard about already,” he said. “And nothing you can do for her.”
I followed him in a daze, blind to everything around me. We ended up by a squat structure, a temporary classroom that had fallen into disrepair, now turned into a makeshift prison. Later I would learn how the accused slept on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, and started each day memorizing the Chairman’s words, beaten or slapped if they missed a single line. Then they’d get carted off to scrub toilets, pull nails from boards and stack bricks, and perform other acts of reform through labor.
Two student guards stood by the door, one with a metal pipe tucked under his arm, and the other with a wooden cudgel. Screams were coming out of a smashed window, along with the sound of fists and feet against flesh, the thump of something more, followed by high hooting laughter. The university official shook his head, no-no-no, dragging his feet, until the Red Guard forced him inside.
I dug a fist into my mouth, regretting my part in this turmoil. Then, I could barely describe the feeling, let alone admit it to myself or to Secretary Sun, that the violence was anything but necessary.
Now, though, I struggle with it. I wonder if I’m giving myself too much foresight, as if recognizing their brutality somehow washed my hands clean.
CHAPTER 24
Swaying as the train followed the curved track, I pictured myself in the muddy waters of the Yangtze below, tossed around in the foam. Spotting a stick, I tried to track its movement but it soon disappeared out of sight.
We were returning to Wuhan, to the villa tucked into an inlet of East Lake. Across from me, Secretary Sun dozed. We’d taken the overnight train from Beijing, in a car that smelled like coal dust and old sweat, and I’d fallen asleep before him. I’d woken up a few times, confused where I was, before drowsing again.
Dawn was breaking now. His mouth parted, his arms loose at his sides, he seemed younger. Vulnerable. It was the first time I’d ever seen him asleep, which made me feel close to him.
In the end, I hadn’t found any monsters or freaks, any bloodthirsty bourgeoisie of the sort the Chairman railed against. I’d only witnessed students waving wooden swords, terrifying professors and school administrators who confessed to every accusation to stop the beatings. I wrapped my arms around myself. I’d never forget the helpless woman in the basket. After the Red Guard finished with her that day, what did they do to her?
Secretary Sun twitched, his head dipping into his chest. He woke up embarrassed and shuffled the papers on the seat beside him.
“How long have you been up?” he asked.
“I couldn’t sleep much,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about what I’ll tell the Chairman. No matter what I say, he’ll think it was a waste of time.”
“No one could have tried harder,” he said.
“So you agree,” I said dully. “Anything I tell him is pointless.”
“I didn’t say that.” He’d been preoccupied last night, as we left the government guesthouse and as the train pulled out of the station, perhaps because he, too, was preparing to see the Chairman. But it turned out he’d been wondering when to tell me about my family. “Your mother recovered,” he said. “And much of the village, too.”
“What are you talking about?” Most days, most of the time, I pushed my family from my mind. I’d all but given up on getting any report about what happened after the fever struck them last autumn; I’d have to go there and find out for myself someday.
“I got word last night.” As we’d finished dinner at the government canteen, he’d been given a folder. Reports for the Chairman, I’d assumed.
