Ji-li Jiang Character Analysis

I was born on Chinese New Year.

Carefully, my parents chose my name: Ji-li, meaning lucky and beautiful. They hoped I would be the happiest girl in the world.

I was happy because I was always loved and respected. I was proud because I was able to excel and always expected to succeed. I was trusting, too. I never doubted what I was told: “Heaven and earth are great, but greater still is the kindness of the Communist Party; father and mother are dear, but dearer still is Chairman Mao.”

Song Po-po told us that our extended family used to occupy two whole buildings, ten rooms all together. “Then they all moved away, and only your family and your Fourth Aunt’s family were left. Your family only has one room now. It’s just too bad.” She shook her head sadly.

But I didn’t feel that way at all. I loved our top floor room. […] Our room was ten times as big as many of my classmates’ homes, and a hundred times brighter. Best of all, we had a private bathroom, a full-sized room with a sink, a toilet, and a tub. It was almost as large as some families’ entire homes. Many did not have a bathroom at all, or even a flush toilet, and very few had a full-size bathroom that they did not have to share with other families.

My friends and I had grown up with the stories of the brave revolutionaries who had saved China. We were proud of our precious red scarves, which, like the national flag, were dyed red with the blood of our revolutionary martyrs. We had often been sorry that we […] had missed our chance to become national heroes by helping our motherland.

Now our chance had come. Destroying the four olds was a new battle, and an important one: It would keep China from losing her Communist ideals. Though we were not facing real guns or real tanks, this battle would be even harder, because our enemies, the rotten ideas and customs we were so used to, were inside ourselves.

I was so excited […] There were many more important missions waiting for me. I felt I was already a Liberation Army soldier who was ready to go out for battle.

Yin Lan-lan had written, “As one of its victims, I denounce the revisionist education system. Being from a working-class family, I have to do a lot more housework than students from rich families. So I have difficulty passing exams. And I was not allowed to be a Young Pioneer or to participate in school choir. The teachers think only of grades when evaluating a student. They forget that we, the working class, are the masters of our socialist society.”

“Yin Lan-lan? A victim?” I was flabbergasted. Yin Lan-lan had flunked three times. She rarely spoke up in class. When she was asked to answer a question, she would just stand there without saying a word. She was not very bright.

“She failed three courses out of five. How could she blame the teachers for that?” An Yi sneered.

Du Hai took the lead. “Down with the bourgeois Jiang Xi-wen! Long live Mao Ze-dong Thought!” he shouted. We repeated the slogans. Then Yin Lan-lan recited, “Our great leader, Chairman Mao, has taught us, ‘Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit him, he will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish by itself.’” Her voice was loud and forceful. “Today, we proletarian revolutionary young guards have come to revolt against you bourgeoisie. Jiang Xi-wen, this is our da-zi-bao. You are to post it on your door now.” She shook the white paper in front of Aunt Xi-wen’s nose.

“My father’s class status…?” I did not see what Du Hai meant at first. “You mean what did my grandfather do? I don’t know. I only know that he died when my father was seven.”

There was a trace of a grin on Du Hai’s face. He stood up lazily and faced the class.

“I know what her grandfather was.” He paused dramatically, sweeping his eyes across the class. “He was a—LANDLORD.”

“Landlord!” The whole class erupted.

“What’s more, her father is a—RIGHTIST.”

“Rightist!” the class was in pandemonium.

I was numb. Landlord! One of the bloodsuckers who exploited the farmers! The number-one enemies, the worst of the “Five Black Categories,” even worse than criminals, or counterrevolutionaries! My grandfather? And Dad, a rightist? One of the reactionary intellectuals who attacked the Party and socialism? No, I could not believe it.

The junior high school entrance examination dreaded by all of us was gone. What a relief! […]

Du Hai sat on his desk roaring with laughter. To him, and to Yin Lan-lan and to the others who were not even sure of graduating, this was wonderful news.

But as I watched Du Hai, my elation suddenly evaporated. Yes, I would have a whole summer to play. But without an entrance exam, how would they pick the students for the elite schools? Ever since third grade, I had been counting on getting into Shi-yi, one of the best junior high schools in Shanghai. Then I had planned on attending an elite high school, and then one of the famous universities. Without an entrance exam, how could I be sure of getting into Shi-yi? What could I do to make up for my family background?

“It seems terrible to just cut them all up. Why don’t we just give them to the theater or to the Red Guards?” Ji-yun held a gown up in front of her. She was imagining what it would be like to wear it, I knew.

“The theater doesn’t need them, and it’s too late to turn them in now. The Red Guards would say that we were hiding them and waiting for New China to fall. Besides, even if we did turn them in, the Red Guards would just burn them anyway.” Grandma looked at me and shook her head as she picked up her scissors. “I just couldn’t bear to sell them,” she said sadly. “Even when your father was in college and we needed the money.” She picked up a lovely gold-patterned robe and said softly, “This was a government official’s uniform. I remember my grandfather wearing it.”

After a few weeks, a new copy of the popular painting Mao Ze-dong on His Way to Anyuan appeared in our alley. I had always loved this painting and the story behind it. When he was a young man, our beloved leader, Chairman Mao, had risked his life to go to the mines of Anyuan by himself to establish a revolutionary base there.

The young Mao in the painting wore a long cotton gown and cloth shoes, and he carried an umbrella under his arm. His brilliant eyes were looking into the distance as if he were already thinking about the great revolutionary task that lay ahead of him. I could not look at the painting without feeling inspired. I was ready to follow him anywhere.

More and more, Six-Fingers and the rest of the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group seemed to be everywhere. They suggested names of possible Black Category families to the Neighborhood Party Committee. They monitored what members of the Black Categories did during the day, recording any visitors to their homes, watched their Morning Repentance and Evening Reports, and supervised their sweeping of the alley twice a day. In addition, the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group patrolled the neighborhood day and night […]

One evening they actually caught a counterrevolutionary! A ragpicker, who was collecting scrap paper to recycle, pulled some old da-zi-bao off the wall and happened to tear the newspaper that was posted underneath. A picture of Chairman Mao on this newspaper ripped in half. Witnessing this criminal act, Six-Fingers and his deputies immediately detained the man and took him to the police station.

An Yi’s grandmother was short and skinny and she tottered on her bound feet. Her husband had been a wealthy man, a capitalist. He had owned a dye factory, but he had died a long time ago. For as long as I could remember, An Yi’s grandmother had lived with her only child—An Yi’s mother, Teacher Wei, An Yi’s father, and her elder sister, who was blind. An Yi’s grandmother took care of them all. I had known her so long that I called her Grandma too.

Grandma and her sister always dressed in black. Sometimes I saw them up on the roof of their apartment, smoking a water pipe and talking together in their funny Ningbo accent. Grandma loved to give us treats.

I sat on our usual bench […] staring at the fleecy white clouds. […]

In the three months since the Cultural Revolution had started, changes had been so constant that I often felt lost. One day the Conservative faction were revolutionaries that defended Chairman Mao’s ideas; the next day, the opposite Rebel faction became the heroes of the Cultural Revolution. I heard that even Chairman of the Nation Liu Shao-qi and General Secretary Deng Xiao-ping were having problems. […]

I wondered what I would be doing if I had been born into a red family […] I hated my grandfather [… but] I did know if I could hate Grandma if she was officially classed as a landlord’s wife. The harder I tried to figure things out, the more confused I felt. I wished I had been born into a red family so I could do my revolutionary duties without worrying.

All my treasures were scattered on the floor. The butterfly fell out of its glass box; one wing was crushed under a bottle of glass beads. My collection of candy wrappers had fallen out of their notebook and were crumpled under my stamp album.

My stamp album! It had been a gift from Grandma when I started school, and it was my dearest treasure. For six years, I had been getting cancelled stamps from my friends, carefully soaking them to get every bit of envelope paper off. I had collected them one by one until I had complete sets. I had even bought some inexpensive sets with my own allowance. I loved my collection even though I knew I should not. With the start of the Cultural Revolution all the stamp shops were closed down, because stamp collecting was considered bourgeois. Now I just knew something terrible was going to happen to it.

One by one I picked up all the clothes, folded them, and put them away. I picked up one of Dad’s white shirts and suddenly flushed with embarrassment and anger. My sanitary belt! It was lying on the floor, not even covered by its blue plastic bag. […]

This, of all things, was private. It was a girl’s secret. I never even let Dad or Ji-yong see it. […] Now one of those Red Guards, probably a boy, had looked at it—had held it! I felt as if I had been stripped naked in public.

[…] Wasn’t a home a private place? A place where the family could feel secure? How could strangers come through and search through our secrets? If Grandpa was a landlord, they could confiscate all his things. But I was not a landlord. Why did they have to search through my things?

After a few steps, I turned around to see if they were all right. I could hardly believe my eyes! Shan-shan had walked right past his mother! She was lying there, injured, and he had not stopped to help her. He couldn’t possibly have missed her. He must not have wanted to expose himself to criticism by helping someone from a black category.

What a son! I took a step toward Aunt Xi-wen and stopped. Maybe I shouldn’t help her either. People would probably say something if they saw me, especially since I was from a black family too….

[…]

Now I remembered that Shan-shan had written a da-zi-bao after their house had been searched, formally breaking relations with his mother. I had admired him for his courage and firmness then.

Du Hai’s mother was standing on a stool, her head lowered to her chest. Two torn shoes, the symbol of immorality, were hung around her neck, along with a sign that read, Sang Hong-Zhen, oppressor of the young, deserves ten thousand deaths. Her disheveled hair dangled around her shocked, gray face. I hardly recognized the once-powerful Neighborhood Party Committee Secretary.

A short man was standing in front of her, shouting […] “She lied to me! She told me Xinjiang was like a flower garden. […] And what did we find when we got there? Nothing! Not a damned thing! […] She fooled us into going to Xinjiang and then didn’t care whether we lived or died. Is that any way to treat a sixteen-year-old boy? While I was sick and begging for my food in Xinjiang, what was she doing here? She was running around with men and having a good time.”

Now that I had entered [junior high school], I was disappointed. All the classes except for mathematics were completely uninteresting. We had no textbooks, only hastily compiled mimeographed handouts. English class was a bore. Politics class was actually just familiar Communist Party history. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology had been replaced by Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture, because of Chairman Mao’s instruction to “combine education with practical experience.” One day the teacher had brought the wrong handouts to class. He had prepared a lesson on raising pigs, but he had mistakenly brought the handout titled “The Close-Planting System of Rice Growing.” He stood awkwardly on the platform for a minute or two, then dismissed the class. The poor teachers! Trained in the traditional sciences, they were totally lost when trying to teach us about pigs or paddy fields.

I had just read an article in the paper. It told of a “historical counterrevolutionary,” who, as a local official before Liberation had killed two Communist guerrillas. The paper explained that because he had confessed and had a positive attitude, he was pardoned. Meanwhile, an “active counterrevolutionary” was convicted of slandering the Red Guards. He refused to confess and was imprisoned.

So this was their policy of psychological pressure. No wonder Uncle Fan thought he should confess to something he had not done. Had he confessed to listening to foreign broadcasts? If he had, why hadn’t he been treated with leniency? Why had he been detained? I could not figure it out.

“You saw your father. He is being remolded through labor. We have evidence that he has committed a serious counterrevolutionary crime.” He paused and fixed me with his eyes. “But he is very stubborn and refuses to confess. And your mother. Humph. She’s another despicable thing!”

“She’s not a thing, she’s a human being,” I wanted to scream, but I knew that I should not provoke him. He could have me arrested, he could never let me see Dad again, he could beat Dad…. I stared at the table.

“You are different from your parents. You were born and raised in New China. You are a child of Chairman Mao. You can choose your own destiny: You can make a clean break with your parents and follow Chairman Mao, and have a bright future; or you can follow your parents and then…you will not come to a good end.”

“This is the blind old grandfather. Every day, in bitter cold or in scorching sun, his little granddaughter led him out to beg for their food. With the little food that he managed to receive, how could he repay his debt to the landlord? Each year the debt increased. Finally, Liu Wen-cai forced him to give up his granddaughter in payment. How could he do that? She was his eyes, his whole life. But what else could he do to escape from this brutal landlord? With tears in his lifeless eyes, he said to her, ‘My dearest, you must go with Mr. Liu. It is not because I do not love you, it is that black-hearted landlord who is tearing us apart.’” My voice trembled slightly, and I became more and more emotional as I spoke.

The woman from the theater spoke. “It’s really not such a hard thing to do. The key is your class stance. The daughter of our former Party Secretary resolved to make a clean break with her mother. When she went onstage to condemn her mother, she actually slapped her face. Of course, we don’t mean that you have to slap your father’s face. The point is that as long as you have the correct class stance, it will be easy to testify.” Her voice grated on my ears.

“There is something you can do to prove you are truly Chairman Mao’s child.” Thin-Face spoke again. “I am sure you can tell us some things your father said and did that showed his landlord and rightist mentality.” I stared at the table, but I could feel his eyes boring into me. “What can you tell us?”

I tried hard to imagine cool things to distract myself, but my legs began to tremble, and my eyes would not focus. I could not see clearly—not the thresher roller, not the bundle of rice in my hand. “Don’t fall down, don’t fall down. It will be all right after today,” I told myself again and again. I repeated Chairman Mao’s quotation, “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.”

Just before noon, when I turned around to get another bundle of rice, I lost consciousness.

The letter complained about the situation in the theater. The faction in power, the Rebels, did whatever they wanted, ignoring the policy directives from the Central Committee of the Party, the letter said. They treated people with nonpolitical problems, like Aunt Wu, as class enemies, and they had humiliated her, shaving half her head in a yin-yang hairdo. They frequently beat their prisoners and had already beaten two to death. They even recorded the screams and moans of the prisoners being tortured, and played the tapes to frighten other prisoners under interrogation.

“We urgently hope,” the letter concluded, “that the Municipal Party Committee will investigate this situation and correct it before it is too late.” The letter was signed, “The Revolutionary Masses.”

The cry jerked out before I knew it. […] “I will take care of both of them. I promise.” As soon as I said it, I realized that I had made my promise to them—to everyone in my family—long ago. I had promised during the days that Grandma and I had hidden in the park; I had promised when I had not testified against Dad; I had promised when I had hidden the letter. I would never do anything to hurt my family, and I would do everything I could to take care of them. My family was too precious to forget and too rare to replace.

Once my life had been defined by my goals: to be a da-dui-zhang, to participate in the exhibition, to be a Red Guard. They seemed unimportant to me now. Now my life was defined by my responsibilities. I had promised to take care of my family, and I would renew that promise every day. I could not give up or withdraw, no matter how hard life became. I would hide my tears and my fear for Mom and Grandma’s sake. It was my turn to take care of them.

The clouds dispersed and the sky lightened a bit. Grandma picked up her broom and turned stiffly around to come home.

“Another day.” I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I will do my job. I will.”

I was born on Chinese New Year.

Carefully, my parents chose my name: Ji-li, meaning lucky and beautiful. They hoped I would be the happiest girl in the world.

I was happy because I was always loved and respected. I was proud because I was able to excel and always expected to succeed. I was trusting, too. I never doubted what I was told: “Heaven and earth are great, but greater still is the kindness of the Communist Party; father and mother are dear, but dearer still is Chairman Mao.”

Song Po-po told us that our extended family used to occupy two whole buildings, ten rooms all together. “Then they all moved away, and only your family and your Fourth Aunt’s family were left. Your family only has one room now. It’s just too bad.” She shook her head sadly.

But I didn’t feel that way at all. I loved our top floor room. […] Our room was ten times as big as many of my classmates’ homes, and a hundred times brighter. Best of all, we had a private bathroom, a full-sized room with a sink, a toilet, and a tub. It was almost as large as some families’ entire homes. Many did not have a bathroom at all, or even a flush toilet, and very few had a full-size bathroom that they did not have to share with other families.

My friends and I had grown up with the stories of the brave revolutionaries who had saved China. We were proud of our precious red scarves, which, like the national flag, were dyed red with the blood of our revolutionary martyrs. We had often been sorry that we […] had missed our chance to become national heroes by helping our motherland.

Now our chance had come. Destroying the four olds was a new battle, and an important one: It would keep China from losing her Communist ideals. Though we were not facing real guns or real tanks, this battle would be even harder, because our enemies, the rotten ideas and customs we were so used to, were inside ourselves.

I was so excited […] There were many more important missions waiting for me. I felt I was already a Liberation Army soldier who was ready to go out for battle.

Yin Lan-lan had written, “As one of its victims, I denounce the revisionist education system. Being from a working-class family, I have to do a lot more housework than students from rich families. So I have difficulty passing exams. And I was not allowed to be a Young Pioneer or to participate in school choir. The teachers think only of grades when evaluating a student. They forget that we, the working class, are the masters of our socialist society.”

“Yin Lan-lan? A victim?” I was flabbergasted. Yin Lan-lan had flunked three times. She rarely spoke up in class. When she was asked to answer a question, she would just stand there without saying a word. She was not very bright.

“She failed three courses out of five. How could she blame the teachers for that?” An Yi sneered.

Du Hai took the lead. “Down with the bourgeois Jiang Xi-wen! Long live Mao Ze-dong Thought!” he shouted. We repeated the slogans. Then Yin Lan-lan recited, “Our great leader, Chairman Mao, has taught us, ‘Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit him, he will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish by itself.’” Her voice was loud and forceful. “Today, we proletarian revolutionary young guards have come to revolt against you bourgeoisie. Jiang Xi-wen, this is our da-zi-bao. You are to post it on your door now.” She shook the white paper in front of Aunt Xi-wen’s nose.

“My father’s class status…?” I did not see what Du Hai meant at first. “You mean what did my grandfather do? I don’t know. I only know that he died when my father was seven.”

There was a trace of a grin on Du Hai’s face. He stood up lazily and faced the class.

“I know what her grandfather was.” He paused dramatically, sweeping his eyes across the class. “He was a—LANDLORD.”

“Landlord!” The whole class erupted.

“What’s more, her father is a—RIGHTIST.”

“Rightist!” the class was in pandemonium.

I was numb. Landlord! One of the bloodsuckers who exploited the farmers! The number-one enemies, the worst of the “Five Black Categories,” even worse than criminals, or counterrevolutionaries! My grandfather? And Dad, a rightist? One of the reactionary intellectuals who attacked the Party and socialism? No, I could not believe it.

The junior high school entrance examination dreaded by all of us was gone. What a relief! […]

Du Hai sat on his desk roaring with laughter. To him, and to Yin Lan-lan and to the others who were not even sure of graduating, this was wonderful news.

But as I watched Du Hai, my elation suddenly evaporated. Yes, I would have a whole summer to play. But without an entrance exam, how would they pick the students for the elite schools? Ever since third grade, I had been counting on getting into Shi-yi, one of the best junior high schools in Shanghai. Then I had planned on attending an elite high school, and then one of the famous universities. Without an entrance exam, how could I be sure of getting into Shi-yi? What could I do to make up for my family background?

“It seems terrible to just cut them all up. Why don’t we just give them to the theater or to the Red Guards?” Ji-yun held a gown up in front of her. She was imagining what it would be like to wear it, I knew.

“The theater doesn’t need them, and it’s too late to turn them in now. The Red Guards would say that we were hiding them and waiting for New China to fall. Besides, even if we did turn them in, the Red Guards would just burn them anyway.” Grandma looked at me and shook her head as she picked up her scissors. “I just couldn’t bear to sell them,” she said sadly. “Even when your father was in college and we needed the money.” She picked up a lovely gold-patterned robe and said softly, “This was a government official’s uniform. I remember my grandfather wearing it.”

After a few weeks, a new copy of the popular painting Mao Ze-dong on His Way to Anyuan appeared in our alley. I had always loved this painting and the story behind it. When he was a young man, our beloved leader, Chairman Mao, had risked his life to go to the mines of Anyuan by himself to establish a revolutionary base there.

The young Mao in the painting wore a long cotton gown and cloth shoes, and he carried an umbrella under his arm. His brilliant eyes were looking into the distance as if he were already thinking about the great revolutionary task that lay ahead of him. I could not look at the painting without feeling inspired. I was ready to follow him anywhere.

More and more, Six-Fingers and the rest of the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group seemed to be everywhere. They suggested names of possible Black Category families to the Neighborhood Party Committee. They monitored what members of the Black Categories did during the day, recording any visitors to their homes, watched their Morning Repentance and Evening Reports, and supervised their sweeping of the alley twice a day. In addition, the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group patrolled the neighborhood day and night […]

One evening they actually caught a counterrevolutionary! A ragpicker, who was collecting scrap paper to recycle, pulled some old da-zi-bao off the wall and happened to tear the newspaper that was posted underneath. A picture of Chairman Mao on this newspaper ripped in half. Witnessing this criminal act, Six-Fingers and his deputies immediately detained the man and took him to the police station.

An Yi’s grandmother was short and skinny and she tottered on her bound feet. Her husband had been a wealthy man, a capitalist. He had owned a dye factory, but he had died a long time ago. For as long as I could remember, An Yi’s grandmother had lived with her only child—An Yi’s mother, Teacher Wei, An Yi’s father, and her elder sister, who was blind. An Yi’s grandmother took care of them all. I had known her so long that I called her Grandma too.

Grandma and her sister always dressed in black. Sometimes I saw them up on the roof of their apartment, smoking a water pipe and talking together in their funny Ningbo accent. Grandma loved to give us treats.

I sat on our usual bench […] staring at the fleecy white clouds. […]

In the three months since the Cultural Revolution had started, changes had been so constant that I often felt lost. One day the Conservative faction were revolutionaries that defended Chairman Mao’s ideas; the next day, the opposite Rebel faction became the heroes of the Cultural Revolution. I heard that even Chairman of the Nation Liu Shao-qi and General Secretary Deng Xiao-ping were having problems. […]

I wondered what I would be doing if I had been born into a red family […] I hated my grandfather [… but] I did know if I could hate Grandma if she was officially classed as a landlord’s wife. The harder I tried to figure things out, the more confused I felt. I wished I had been born into a red family so I could do my revolutionary duties without worrying.

All my treasures were scattered on the floor. The butterfly fell out of its glass box; one wing was crushed under a bottle of glass beads. My collection of candy wrappers had fallen out of their notebook and were crumpled under my stamp album.

My stamp album! It had been a gift from Grandma when I started school, and it was my dearest treasure. For six years, I had been getting cancelled stamps from my friends, carefully soaking them to get every bit of envelope paper off. I had collected them one by one until I had complete sets. I had even bought some inexpensive sets with my own allowance. I loved my collection even though I knew I should not. With the start of the Cultural Revolution all the stamp shops were closed down, because stamp collecting was considered bourgeois. Now I just knew something terrible was going to happen to it.

One by one I picked up all the clothes, folded them, and put them away. I picked up one of Dad’s white shirts and suddenly flushed with embarrassment and anger. My sanitary belt! It was lying on the floor, not even covered by its blue plastic bag. […]

This, of all things, was private. It was a girl’s secret. I never even let Dad or Ji-yong see it. […] Now one of those Red Guards, probably a boy, had looked at it—had held it! I felt as if I had been stripped naked in public.

[…] Wasn’t a home a private place? A place where the family could feel secure? How could strangers come through and search through our secrets? If Grandpa was a landlord, they could confiscate all his things. But I was not a landlord. Why did they have to search through my things?

After a few steps, I turned around to see if they were all right. I could hardly believe my eyes! Shan-shan had walked right past his mother! She was lying there, injured, and he had not stopped to help her. He couldn’t possibly have missed her. He must not have wanted to expose himself to criticism by helping someone from a black category.

What a son! I took a step toward Aunt Xi-wen and stopped. Maybe I shouldn’t help her either. People would probably say something if they saw me, especially since I was from a black family too….

[…]

Now I remembered that Shan-shan had written a da-zi-bao after their house had been searched, formally breaking relations with his mother. I had admired him for his courage and firmness then.

Du Hai’s mother was standing on a stool, her head lowered to her chest. Two torn shoes, the symbol of immorality, were hung around her neck, along with a sign that read, Sang Hong-Zhen, oppressor of the young, deserves ten thousand deaths. Her disheveled hair dangled around her shocked, gray face. I hardly recognized the once-powerful Neighborhood Party Committee Secretary.

A short man was standing in front of her, shouting […] “She lied to me! She told me Xinjiang was like a flower garden. […] And what did we find when we got there? Nothing! Not a damned thing! […] She fooled us into going to Xinjiang and then didn’t care whether we lived or died. Is that any way to treat a sixteen-year-old boy? While I was sick and begging for my food in Xinjiang, what was she doing here? She was running around with men and having a good time.”

Now that I had entered [junior high school], I was disappointed. All the classes except for mathematics were completely uninteresting. We had no textbooks, only hastily compiled mimeographed handouts. English class was a bore. Politics class was actually just familiar Communist Party history. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology had been replaced by Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture, because of Chairman Mao’s instruction to “combine education with practical experience.” One day the teacher had brought the wrong handouts to class. He had prepared a lesson on raising pigs, but he had mistakenly brought the handout titled “The Close-Planting System of Rice Growing.” He stood awkwardly on the platform for a minute or two, then dismissed the class. The poor teachers! Trained in the traditional sciences, they were totally lost when trying to teach us about pigs or paddy fields.

I had just read an article in the paper. It told of a “historical counterrevolutionary,” who, as a local official before Liberation had killed two Communist guerrillas. The paper explained that because he had confessed and had a positive attitude, he was pardoned. Meanwhile, an “active counterrevolutionary” was convicted of slandering the Red Guards. He refused to confess and was imprisoned.

So this was their policy of psychological pressure. No wonder Uncle Fan thought he should confess to something he had not done. Had he confessed to listening to foreign broadcasts? If he had, why hadn’t he been treated with leniency? Why had he been detained? I could not figure it out.

“You saw your father. He is being remolded through labor. We have evidence that he has committed a serious counterrevolutionary crime.” He paused and fixed me with his eyes. “But he is very stubborn and refuses to confess. And your mother. Humph. She’s another despicable thing!”

“She’s not a thing, she’s a human being,” I wanted to scream, but I knew that I should not provoke him. He could have me arrested, he could never let me see Dad again, he could beat Dad…. I stared at the table.

“You are different from your parents. You were born and raised in New China. You are a child of Chairman Mao. You can choose your own destiny: You can make a clean break with your parents and follow Chairman Mao, and have a bright future; or you can follow your parents and then…you will not come to a good end.”

“This is the blind old grandfather. Every day, in bitter cold or in scorching sun, his little granddaughter led him out to beg for their food. With the little food that he managed to receive, how could he repay his debt to the landlord? Each year the debt increased. Finally, Liu Wen-cai forced him to give up his granddaughter in payment. How could he do that? She was his eyes, his whole life. But what else could he do to escape from this brutal landlord? With tears in his lifeless eyes, he said to her, ‘My dearest, you must go with Mr. Liu. It is not because I do not love you, it is that black-hearted landlord who is tearing us apart.’” My voice trembled slightly, and I became more and more emotional as I spoke.

The woman from the theater spoke. “It’s really not such a hard thing to do. The key is your class stance. The daughter of our former Party Secretary resolved to make a clean break with her mother. When she went onstage to condemn her mother, she actually slapped her face. Of course, we don’t mean that you have to slap your father’s face. The point is that as long as you have the correct class stance, it will be easy to testify.” Her voice grated on my ears.

“There is something you can do to prove you are truly Chairman Mao’s child.” Thin-Face spoke again. “I am sure you can tell us some things your father said and did that showed his landlord and rightist mentality.” I stared at the table, but I could feel his eyes boring into me. “What can you tell us?”

I tried hard to imagine cool things to distract myself, but my legs began to tremble, and my eyes would not focus. I could not see clearly—not the thresher roller, not the bundle of rice in my hand. “Don’t fall down, don’t fall down. It will be all right after today,” I told myself again and again. I repeated Chairman Mao’s quotation, “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.”

Just before noon, when I turned around to get another bundle of rice, I lost consciousness.

The letter complained about the situation in the theater. The faction in power, the Rebels, did whatever they wanted, ignoring the policy directives from the Central Committee of the Party, the letter said. They treated people with nonpolitical problems, like Aunt Wu, as class enemies, and they had humiliated her, shaving half her head in a yin-yang hairdo. They frequently beat their prisoners and had already beaten two to death. They even recorded the screams and moans of the prisoners being tortured, and played the tapes to frighten other prisoners under interrogation.

“We urgently hope,” the letter concluded, “that the Municipal Party Committee will investigate this situation and correct it before it is too late.” The letter was signed, “The Revolutionary Masses.”

The cry jerked out before I knew it. […] “I will take care of both of them. I promise.” As soon as I said it, I realized that I had made my promise to them—to everyone in my family—long ago. I had promised during the days that Grandma and I had hidden in the park; I had promised when I had not testified against Dad; I had promised when I had hidden the letter. I would never do anything to hurt my family, and I would do everything I could to take care of them. My family was too precious to forget and too rare to replace.

Once my life had been defined by my goals: to be a da-dui-zhang, to participate in the exhibition, to be a Red Guard. They seemed unimportant to me now. Now my life was defined by my responsibilities. I had promised to take care of my family, and I would renew that promise every day. I could not give up or withdraw, no matter how hard life became. I would hide my tears and my fear for Mom and Grandma’s sake. It was my turn to take care of them.

The clouds dispersed and the sky lightened a bit. Grandma picked up her broom and turned stiffly around to come home.

“Another day.” I took a deep breath and shook my head. “I will do my job. I will.”