The Incarnations

28. The Anti-Capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls

People’s Republic of China, 1966

I

THE PEASANT IS old and shrunken, his clothes sewn out of Plentiful Harvest rice sacks. He hawks and spits on the classroom floor, and rows of fifteen-year-old girls in padded-cotton jackets and trousers wrinkle their noses at their desks. Most of my classmates are from good Beijing families, and some are daughters of the Communist elite. Their fathers use spittoons.

The peasant shuffles up on to the teaching platform, and Teacher Zhao introduces him as Comrade Po.

‘Comrade Po is from a village outside Beijing,’ Teacher Zhao says, ‘and in today’s lesson, “Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by Evil Landlords”, Comrade Po will tell us about his suffering during the Nationalist era.’

Comrade Po grins with overcrowded, never-been-brushed-looking teeth, and starts lecturing us in his guttural, rural dialect. A quarter of an hour goes by before Teacher Zhao realizes we can’t understand and translates:

‘One year the sorghum harvest was so bad, Comrade Po couldn’t pay the rent. He begged the landlord not to evict him, as he and his wife and children would freeze to death. The landlord told Comrade Po that he could stay if he gave him his eldest daughter. Well, what choice did Comrade Po have? To save his wife and eight other children, he gave his eldest daughter away. The landlord raped her, and Comrade Po’s daughter was so ashamed she drank insecticide and died. She was eleven years old.’

The tragedy of Comrade Po’s life under the Nationalists reduces our class to tears. Red Star weeps on to her desk lid, and Soviet Chen shakes with her head in her hands. My eyes remain stubbornly dry, and I panic because I don’t feel sorrow for Comrade Po as he stands on the teaching platform, wiggling a finger about in his nose. So I think of my father, sent to a labour camp in Qinghai because his department had to expel a quota of rightists in the latest Anti-Rightist campaign. Ma and I haven’t had a letter from Father in over a year. Though we daren’t say it, we fear he is dead. Tears drip on to my desk and I am relieved. Now in the eyes of others my conscience is politically correct.

A spinster devoted to Communism, Teacher Zhao is deeply moved by Comrade Po’s tales. Behind the thick magnifying lenses of her glasses, her eyes well up.

‘Comrades!’ Teacher Zhao cries. ‘Let Comrade Po’s tragic story remind us why we must be revolutionary and fight!’

Teacher Zhao punches her fist to the ceiling, a damp patch of revolutionary fervour in the armpit of her chalk-dusty Mao jacket, and our class applauds. Comrade Po grins and flicks his nose pickings and, above the blackboard, Chairman Mao watches approvingly from his gilded frame.

The winter sun is setting, the alley shadows lengthening into dusk. I walk briskly, my satchel bouncing at my side, my breath fogging in the freezing air. I am nearly home and out of the cold when a shout turns my head.

‘Yi Moon! Stop!’

Red Star, Long March, Patriotic Hua and all their hangers-on stride down Vinegar Makers Alley towards me. Hair in braids. Padded-cotton jackets buttoned up. Trousers long and grey. They crowd around me, exhaling white clouds of contempt and backing me up against a wall.

‘Why were you smirking during Comrade Po’s story?’ Long March asks. ‘You thought he was smelly and backward, didn’t you? You thought his daughter’s suicide was funny.’

Though speaking back to Long March only makes matters worse, I say, ‘I wasn’t smirking. Comrade Po’s daughter’s suicide was very sad. I was crying like the rest of the class.’

‘No, you weren’t,’ Resist America says. ‘I saw you and you didn’t shed a tear.’

‘I cried.’

‘How dare you accuse Resist America of being a liar?’ Long March says, her eyes flashing in outrage. ‘Rightist bitch! Your father deserves to be worked to death in that labour camp!’

‘Everyone saw you laughing at Comrade Po,’ says Red Star.

The others nod and chime in that they saw me laughing too, and I shrink back. There is not one girl not complicit in this group lie. A shy girl called Socialist Flower steps towards me with a glass bottle of red paint. Socialist Flower’s shyness, and the fact that her father was once condemned as a rightist too, had led me to think she was a secret ally of mine. But I was mistaken. Socialist Flower’s nose twitches as she holds the bottle, excited to be one of Long March’s gang.

‘Yi Moon is a capitalist parasite, sucking the blood of the masses!’ Red Star says. ‘The time has come to cure her blood thirst once and for all!’

I look at the red liquid in Socialist Flower’s glass bottle, sedimented at the bottom, clearer at the top. That’s actual blood, I think, shocked. Resist America and Patriotic Hua grab my arms. ‘Please! No!’ I cry. Socialist Flower giggles nervously as she moves the bottle to my lips.

‘Drink, Rightist!’ Long March commands. ‘Drink!’

I jerk my head back and clamp my lips.

‘Throw it at her!’ Resist America shouts.

There are gasps of horror and delight as Socialist Flower splashes blood over my mouth, down my chin and cotton jacket. The stench of blood fills my nose. Blood drips on the ground as I bend over and retch.

‘Pour the blood over her, Socialist Flower!’ Long March orders. ‘Over her head!’

Socialist Flower giggles as she lifts the bottle, still three quarters full. Resist America yanks my head back up by my hair, and I squeeze my eyes shut tight.

‘Drink, Rightist!’ she orders. ‘Open your mouth. .’

Bells jangle and brakes screech, and I open my eyes instead.

‘Hey!’

Your Flying Pigeon skids to a halt and the girls turn to look at you: Zhang Liya, leader of the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls’ detachment of the Communist Youth League. You straddle the saddle of your bike, hands squeezing the brakes. You arch your eyebrow at our scuffle. ‘Comrades,’ you say, ‘what are you up to with Yi Moon?’

Socialist Flower smiles uncertainly. She holds the bottle over my head, not sure what to do.

‘We are disciplining Moon for laughing at Comrade Po during today’s lesson in “Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by Evil Landlords”,’ explains Long March. ‘Moon’s laughter is evidence of her counter-revolutionary views.’

‘Moon’s too timid to raise her hand, never mind laugh at a speaker in class,’ you say scornfully. ‘Leave her alone now. You’ve splashed blood on her already. You’ve gone far enough.’

Frustration twists Long March’s pretty face into ugliness. ‘But Liya,’ she says sharply, ‘Yi Moon is a class enemy and must be punished!’

‘I said, “Leave her alone,”’ you repeat.

Silence. They let me go, and I wipe frantically at my mouth and chin. Long March fumes as though she wants to snatch the bottle from Socialist Flower and smash it over your head. But she doesn’t dare protest. Your father is a high-ranking Party official, chauffeured to Zhongnanhai every morning in a black car that glides through the streets of Haidian. One word to your father and higher Communist powers would come down on Long March like a People’s Liberation Army boot stamping on a cockroach. You command respect and obedience from every student in our school. But power hasn’t corrupted you. Recognizing that Long March’s pride has been wounded, you say in a conciliatory tone, ‘Go on ahead, Long March. Go and start the Youth League meeting without me. You can lead the meeting tonight.’

Long March nods, placated to be put in charge. ‘Capitalist parasite,’ she hisses at me.

And our classmates walk away. They turn the corner of Vinegar Makers Alley, and we are alone. I stammer my thanks and you lean on the handlebars of your bike and regard me with your clear, strong gaze. Your short hair frames a striking face, with high cheekbones and eyes as determined as those of a heroine in a propaganda poster. Every year you are cast as the revolutionary lead in the school play, but this is as much down to your birthright as your good looks. Before he became a Party official, your father fought the Nationalists, then served as a commander in the Korean War (sacrificing his right eye during hand-to-hand combat with an American soldier in Pyongyang). Some people are born to stand out from the crowd and lead, I think, gazing at you in admiration. You gaze back as though thinking the opposite of me.

‘Pig’s blood,’ you say. ‘You better rinse your clothes in cold water when you get home.’

Pig’s blood. Nausea turns my stomach, and I wipe again at my blood-smeared mouth.

‘Long March goes too far,’ you admit. ‘I’ll speak to her. I’ll ask her to stop these attacks.’

‘Why does she hate me so much?’ I ask.

I expect you to say it’s because Long March is a staunch Communist and vigilant with class enemies. But instead you say, ‘Long March is an unhappy person. People who are unhappy often hurt others.’

I consider this, and then say dismally, ‘But I am unhappy. I don’t go around bullying people.’

‘That’s because you haven’t had the chance.’

Then you are gone. Pedalling up Vinegar Makers Alley to catch up with your friends, leaving me with the pale wisps of your strange remark lingering in the freezing air.

When I get home, I go straight to the communal standpipe in our courtyard and crouch by the spluttering tap to wash the blood from my hands and face. I strip off my jacket and throw it in the bucket underneath. Shivering in my vest, I plunge my hands in the near-frozen water to scrub out the blood before my mother catches me. But my timing is bad, and she emerges from our room with a bowl of carrots to be rinsed.

‘Why are you washing your jacket, Moon?’ she asks.

‘I spilled red paint in art class,’ I say. ‘We were painting political slogans and I knocked the paint pot over.’

The wrinkles deepen around my mother’s concerned eyes. ‘Little Moon,’ she says, ‘tell me the truth. What happened? Are your classmates picking on you again?’

I stare into the bucket, watching the blood eddying in the water. My mother puts down the soil-muddy carrots, places her hand on my shoulder, and asks, ‘Do you love Chairman Mao with all your heart?’

I nod. Of course I do.

‘Well, Moon, you must let your love of Chairman Mao shine out. When those girls recognize that love, shining for Chairman Mao in your heart, they will leave you alone.’

I nod. ‘Okay, Ma.’

My mother smiles a drained, tired smile. Since my father was sent to Qinghai, her belief in Chairman Mao and the Party has become very devout. It’s not enough, she says, to be revolutionary merely in action. It’s not enough to take up a spade and toil for sixteen hours a day when the Party conscripts you to dig a reservoir by the Ming Tombs. It’s not enough to spend every waking hour chasing sparrows, rats, mosquitoes and flies when the Party tells us the Four Pests must be eradicated. It’s not enough to melt our pots and pans in backyard furnaces when the Party tells us our national iron production must overtake the West’s. To be revolutionary merely in action is not enough. If you don’t love Chairman Mao in your heart of hearts, the Party will find out, like they found my father out. They will arrest you and send you away to Qinghai.

My mother squats down and gently nudges me from the bucket. ‘Let me wash that for you, Moonbeam,’ she says. ‘Go indoors and warm up by the stove.’

My mother plunges her arthritic hands into the pig’s-blood-tainted water and scrubs. Shivering, I stand up, and as I cross the courtyard to our room, I see Granny Xi glaring at me out of her window. After my father was convicted as a rightist, Granny Xi organized a petition, calling on the Residents’ Committee to evict us. Though the petition was signed by the other families in the courtyard, we haven’t yet been served an eviction notice. Offended that we are still here, our neighbours refuse to look at my mother and me. Granny Xi glares right at us, though. She makes her hatred of class enemies known.

The next morning I wake at six, wash and get dressed. Mother serves breakfast, then scolds my lack of appetite as I struggle to eat her rice porridge (‘Think of all the starving children in America!’). At seven I say goodbye and leave. But instead of going to the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls, I go to the local junk yard and wait until my mother leaves for her cleaning job. Then I return to our room and daydream the rest of my day away.

I don’t go to school for three days. I know that Teacher Zhao will send a letter to my mother, and I will be caught. But whatever punishment lies in wait is worth the respite from my classmates’ hate.

There is a knocking on our door in the evening. Mother stiffens and lowers the woollen sock she is knitting, and we exchange nervous looks. Since father was sent to the labour camp, no one has come to visit us. A knocking in the night can only be bad news.

‘Who is it?’ my mother calls anxiously.

‘Zhang Liya. I have come to speak to Yi Moon.’

My mother leaps up and throws open the door, as though to keep you waiting for even a second would be a grave discourtesy.

‘Zhang Liya!’ she cries. ‘What an honour! Come in!’

My mother trips over her feet as she fetches you a chair, then apologizes profusely for the chair’s wobbly legs. You sit down and Mother brings you a cup of tea, which you politely accept and sip beneath my mother’s astonished gaze. Though I am embarrassed by my mother’s bowing and scraping, I am just as stunned to see Zhang Liya, daughter of an eminent Communist official, in our dingy, cramped room of broken furniture and smoke-sooty walls. Sensing that you want to talk to me privately, my mother says brightly, ‘Excuse me, Zhang Liya, but I must go to the store to buy some eggs!’ And before we can point out that the shops closed hours ago, she grabs her coat and dashes out into the freezing night.

You sit, hands in lap, in the wobbly-legged chair. Your deep-set eyes drift over the used tea leaves Ma has spread out to dry on newspaper (to brew second or third pots), and our damp underwear pegged on a line above the coal-burning stove, which leaks headachey fumes. Your gaze comes to rest on me.

‘Yi Moon, Teacher Zhao wants to know why you haven’t you been in school.’

‘Oh. .’ I say, flushing. ‘Stomach flu. .’ I am a clumsy liar, and I look down at my lap, flustered.

‘I spoke to Long March,’ you say, brushing aside my lie, ‘and Long March has given me her word that she won’t bully you any more. I spoke to Teacher Zhao too, and she has promised that if you are back at your desk tomorrow, you won’t be disciplined for missing school.’

I stare at you, speechless. How did you convince Teacher Zhao to bend the rules for another pupil? How can a fifteen-year-old have such power and sway?

‘You must go back to school, Yi Moon,’ you urge, ‘or you will make everything worse for yourself. .’

What could be worse than school? I think. But I nod and say, ‘Thank you, Zhang Liya. I will be back in class tomorrow.’

You nod back, satisfied. Then you stand and go to the door. Out in the courtyard, I watch you kick up the kickstand of your Flying Pigeon. Your eyes obscured in the darkness, I am suddenly emboldened enough to ask, ‘Zhang Liya, why are you being so kind to me?’

You look at me uncertainly. Then you wheel your bicycle out the gate, leaving my question unanswered in the night.

Back at school, everything is as you said. Teacher Zhao nods her salt-and-pepper head in approval when she sees me at my desk. Though I have no note from my mother, she doesn’t ask about my absence. Long March and her gang don’t ask either and go on braiding each other’s hair and singing ‘The East is Red’ before the morning bell. The day goes on and no one shoots me any hateful looks. No one ‘accidentally’ barges into me or trips me up. No one hisses ‘Stinking Rightist’ in the hall. There’s no opening of my desk lid to find a pot of glue poured over my books. It’s as though there’s an invisible circle around me that no one dares cross.

During the breaks from lessons, I roam the playground on my own then read in a corner of the library. Most girls would be miserable to be cast out by their classmates. Most girls would be forlorn. But after Long March and her gang’s long campaign of hate, I am relieved.

On Sunday morning, I am studying a history book about the Communists’ defeat of the Japanese devils in the War of Resistance against Japan, when there is a knock at the door. My mother puts down the handkerchief she is embroidering with ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ and goes to answer. I hear your strong, distinctive voice, but don’t catch your words.

‘Wait a moment!’ my mother shrills in excitement. ‘I’ll ask her!’ She turns back into our dark hovel, skirt and apron flaring. ‘Zhang Liya wants to know if you’ll go on a bike ride with her!’

‘But I don’t own a bike.’

Bells are trilling outside. I put my homework aside and go to the door. In the courtyard you stand holding two shiny, brand-new Flying Pigeons by the handlebars. Your short hair is tucked behind your ears and you look military and tough in your father’s hand-me-down People’s Liberation Army jacket.

‘Which bicycle do you want, Moon?’ you ask. ‘The red one, or the blue?’

We cycle through Haidian, past Tsinghua University, to the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, torched by the British and French devils during the Qing Dynasty. We climb off our bikes and push them by the handlebars as we walk amongst the collapsed pillars and arches of the once-majestic palace, now desolate and overgrown with weeds. We trample through the withered grasses and you say sombrely, ‘These ruins symbolize how weak China was before Liberation. How fortunate we are that Chairman Mao taught our nation to stand up and be proud!’

I nod. I vehemently agree.

‘Chairman Mao would never have let the foreign devils ransack our palaces! He would have sent out the People’s Liberation Army, one million strong, to destroy them!’

You smile at this. The wind blows your short hair up from the roots, and your eyes shine with patriotic pride. ‘After high school I am going to join the army and fight to defend our motherland,’ you declare. ‘And when I can no longer fight, I will serve the people by becoming a Party official. I’m not going to university. I’d rather have adventures than learn from books.’

Though I have no desire to be a soldier or politician, I envy your ambition. I envy your confidence that your ambitions will be fulfilled. ‘What about you, Yi Moon?’ you ask. ‘What will you do after school?’

‘The government will assign me a job,’ I say quietly. ‘I will most likely end up as a cleaner like my mother.’

You frown at me, concerned. ‘Why are your ambitions so low?’ you ask. ‘You are very clever. You could study at Tsinghua if you wanted. You could be more than a cleaner. .’

I want to explain that I will never go to university because of my father. But I remember my mother’s advice: Before you so much as breathe, think about whether it could be misconstrued as a criticism about the Party. ‘Misconstrued’ because my mother and I have no criticisms. We support everything the Party does.

‘Ordinary workers are important,’ I say. ‘They serve the people and the motherland too. I will be proud to be a cleaner, and will work my hardest at the job.’

You nod, accepting that I will be content to mop floors for the rest of my life. And suddenly I am heavy of heart, for my future looks as bleak and hopeless as my life now.

At dusk we cycle to a noodle shop in Wet Nurse Alley, where the owner greets you like a visiting dignitary and immediately serves us two bowls of noodles with ground beef.

‘This costs a week of my mother’s wages,’ I gasp, reading the menu. ‘I can’t afford this!’

‘Don’t worry,’ you say casually. ‘My father has an account here. He has accounts in most places in Haidian.’

The delicious aroma of beef rises from the noodles. The last time I ate meat was during the Spring Festival, nearly a year ago, and I bury my head and chopsticks in the bowl, slurping up the noodles and broth. When the bowl is empty, I belch and wipe my mouth, and am ashamed to see that you have been watching me. How greedy I must have looked. Your own noodles are untouched.

‘We can’t be friends at school, Moon,’ you say. ‘You understand why, don’t you?’

I understand why. You are as red and glorious as our national flag, and I am as black as the grime under a convicted rightist’s fingernails. Of course I understand why. But I still feel slapped.

‘Then why be my friend at all, Liya?’ I ask. ‘Why bother with a friendship that must be kept secret?’

You widen your eyes in surprise at my question. ‘How could I not want to be your friend, Moon?’ you say. ‘When I am with you I’m so at ease. It’s as though I have known you all my life. .’

Your praise makes me blush, and I forgive you at once. Your request is understandable, and it’s selfish of me to take offence.

‘I understand, Liya,’ I say. ‘It’s important that you maintain your red status, so you can one day fight for Chairman Mao and our motherland. I don’t mind if we can’t be friends at school. I am lucky to get to be your friend at all.’

You smile at me, your deep-set eyes wells of gratitude. And I smile back, hoping that my understanding will last. Hoping resentment won’t creep back in.

The next weekend, when your father is away on Party business in Beidaihe and your stepmother visiting relatives in Tianjin, you invite me to stay at your home. You live in a courtyard like me, but whereas six families are crowded into our ramshackle building, the Zhang family have the entire property to themselves. You show me around, and I sigh with envy. The furniture in every room is elegant and skilfully crafted, and as well as portraits of Chairman Mao, delicate bird and flower paintings by a famous Hangzhou artist decorate the walls. But what I envy most is the privacy. Never do you have to listen to your neighbours rowing, or making noisy love, weeping or sneezing, or beating their kids in the next room. You even have your own private bathroom, with a flushing toilet, hot and cold running water, and a wooden bathtub — sparing you trips to the stinking public convenience and the lice-ridden communal bathhouse, crowded with other people’s naked bodies.

‘You bath in your own home?’ I ask.

‘Every night,’ you say. ‘Let’s have a bath now.’ And you turn on the hot tap and strip.

The water is cleaner and hotter than in the communal baths, and we steep at opposite ends of the wooden tub, speechless with pleasure. Submerged in water, I hug my knees to my chest, conscious of how skinny I am. The Three Years of Natural Disasters, and the food shortages that ensued, stunted my growth. The hundreds of meals I went without during those hardscrabble years have left me as underdeveloped as a child. One look at your healthy, womanly body, however, flushed a radiant pink, tells me you were never kept awake at night by a growling stomach. You smile at me through the rising steam, then surprise me by wistfully saying, ‘Moon, you have such lovely long hair. Can I wash it for you?’

I turn my back to you, slide up the tub and sit between your legs. You unbraid my hair and comb it out with your fingers. You lather up a bar of soap.

‘Your hair is like silk. .’ you praise, fingers massaging my scalp. ‘So lustrous and soft.’

‘Why don’t you grow your own hair?’ I ask, thinking of your short bob, cut to the earlobes.

‘No way,’ you laugh. ‘Long hair is bourgeois.’

I hear the shudder in your voice, and I say, ‘Well, in that case, I ought to cut mine short like yours.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ you joke in a warning tone. ‘Don’t touch a strand!’

I slide down the tub and slip underwater, swishing my hair about to rinse out the soap. How strange and contradictory you are, I think, to admire my hair and condemn it at the same time.

After a meal of pork dumplings, cooked for us by your servant, we go to spend the evening in your bedroom. The room has a bed, a desk and chair, a white bust of Chairman Mao and no character to speak of. Though you must sleep there every night, the room has a bare and utilitarian air, as though purged of your girlhood things to prepare for life in the Liberation Army barracks. I sit by the record player and flip through the collection of vinyl. ‘The East is Red’. ‘Ode to the Motherland’. ‘The Night-soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain’. Revolutionary anthems with rosy-cheeked workers holding their hoes and scythes aloft on the cardboard sleeves.

‘You can listen to any record you like,’ you say.

‘Um. . that’s okay.’

Sensing my boredom with your record collection, you ask hesitantly, ‘Do you want to hear a different kind of music?’

I look up from ‘Raise the Red Flag for the Soldiers, Peasants and Workers’. ‘All right.’

You go to your bed and grope under your bedding for a screwdriver. You then use the screwdriver to pry up a loose floorboard and reach beneath to pull out a battered cardboard box.

‘A servant was cleaning out a store cupboard a few years ago,’ you say, ‘and found some of my mother’s things. My father said they were decadent trophies of the Nationalist era and threw them out. But I sneaked out in the night and got them out of the bin.’

You tilt your chin and say defensively, ‘My mother died when I was six. This is all I have of her.’

You pull the lid off the cardboard box and lift out a scarlet qipao, embroidered with golden flowers. I gasp and stroke the qipao, my fingers enjoying the sensation of pure silk.

‘This was my mother’s dress,’ you say. ‘Here is a photograph of her when she was twenty.’ You show me a black and white photo of a beautiful woman, posing with her hand under her chin. She has an enigmatic smile on her lips and a white gardenia in her hair.

‘Your mother looks like a movie star,’ I sigh.

You modestly brush my compliment aside, though I can tell you are pleased. ‘Of course,’ you say sternly, ‘my mother would never doll herself up like a woman of loose morals if she was alive today. This photograph was taken in the Nationalist era, when women were exploited and oppressed by the shackles of beauty.’

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thanks to Communism, women are now emancipated from the tyranny of lipstick and hair-curlers.’ Though, gazing at your lovely mother, I can’t help but think that lipstick and hair-curlers weren’t all bad.

There’s one more object in the cardboard box: a record with not a worker, peasant or soldier on the sleeve but a glamorous woman with her hair in the stiff waves of a permanent and the same hand-under-chin pose as your mother.

‘This is a love song from Hong Kong, where my mother grew up. She used to play it to me when I was little. I listen to it sometimes, when my father and stepmother aren’t home. .’ Another hard and defensive stare. ‘It helps me remember her.’

You lower the record on to the turntable and drop the needle in the groove. There is hissing and crackling, then a singer warbling in Cantonese to a big band. The melody is joyful, but with a hint of melancholy. You translate the lyrics for me.

‘“I will make you mine. . I will love you until the end of time. .” The song is about a shop girl in love with the mail boy.’

Though it’s just a simple love ballad, it sends shivers down my spine and I realize it’s been years since I heard a song without a militant marching-band beat, rallying the masses to fight for the Socialist motherland. It has been years since I heard a woman singing of love for a man who is not Chairman Mao.

I take a deep, steadying breath. This record is from Hong Kong, the prison island where the British devils have enslaved our Chinese brothers and sisters. A Marxist — Maoist analysis of this song would most certainly reveal its hidden anti-Communist agenda, that the song intends to lure us from the path of socialism by corrupting us with bourgeois longings for romantic love. Oblivious, you sway to the music, your eyes shut.

‘Zhang Liya. .’ I say, in a quiet but urgent tone, ‘maybe we shouldn’t be listening to this anti-Communist Hong Kong music. .’

You snap out of your trance and there’s a warping sound as you stop the music, dragging the needle across the vinyl. You snatch the record from the turntable and shove it back into the sleeve. You seem shaken and upset.

‘Thank you, Yi Moon,’ you say. ‘I will stop listening to this Hong Kong record. I will overcome my sentimental attachment to my mother’s things. I will destroy these shameful, decadent possessions first thing tomorrow.’

You put another record on the turntable, and the strident marching beat of ‘The Night-soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain’ fills the room. You avoid my eyes, and I know that you won’t destroy your mother’s things tomorrow. You will continue to hide them under the floorboard and cherish them with all your heart.

Later, under thick bedcovers on your coal-heated bed you ask, ‘Do you miss your father?’

Our heads share a pillow, and your breath is warm and tickling on my cheek. At the mention of my father, my heart clenches with the fear he has died in the labour camp. But I don’t speak this fear. I open my mouth and a well-rehearsed, politically correct answer comes out.

‘He’s no longer a father to me,’ I say. ‘Only when Class Enemy Yi Liang has been fully rehabilitated as a loyal citizen of the People’s Republic of China will I accept him as a father again.’

You are silent and doubtful in the darkness. Then you ask, ‘What was he like? Before he went away?’

When I was a child, my father read folktales to me. He gave me calligraphy lessons in the courtyard, writing on stone with a long brush dipped in a pail of water. He taught me to ride a bicycle, holding the saddle from behind (‘Keep on pedalling, Little Moon! I’m here to catch you if you fall!’). He named me Little Moon because I was born with a ‘face as bright and round as the moon’.

‘He was a good father,’ I whisper. I squeeze my eyes shut, but tears squeak out. You hear my sniffles.

‘Don’t cry, Moon.’ You put your arms around me, holding me closer to the heat and pulse of your body. ‘Don’t cry. Your father will be reformed and released soon.’

You kiss my eyelids with light butterfly kisses that flutter down into the pit of my belly. It’s so unexpected, I stop crying immediately. The last person who kissed me like this was my mother, and not since I was a little girl. You stop kissing me, but don’t move away. Your breath is humid on my face.

‘What about your father?’ I whisper. ‘What’s he like?’

You laugh and say, ‘One-eyed Zhang gave me a good Communist upbringing. He was reading passages of The Communist Manifesto to me when I was still in the womb. When I was old enough to read he made me memorize People’s Daily editorials and recite them back to him. If I made too many mistakes, that one-eyed bastard would beat me.’ You laugh again. Bitter and without mirth.

‘I should be grateful to Comrade Zhang, I suppose,’ you say. ‘Thanks to his strict ideological training, political speeches are effortless for me. . My father wanted to call me Soviet Zhang —’ you pause ‘— but my mother insisted on the name of Liya. She was much gentler than him. Not a day goes by when I don’t miss her. .’

You stroke my hair, your fingers tickling my scalp. It’s past midnight, much later than I am used to. My eyelids are drooping, the tempo of my blood slowing down.

‘You were looking at me in the bathtub,’ you say.

Your words shake me back to wakefulness.

‘What?’

‘My breasts,’ you say. ‘You were looking.’

I laugh in surprise. ‘You were naked. How could I not look?’

I hear the muscles in your throat contract. ‘You can touch them if you like.’

I laugh again, embarrassed, not sure whether you are joking. I don’t move, so you grab my limp hand and place it on your pyjama top, over your left breast. I rest my hand there awkwardly for a moment, then I squeeze. ‘Much bigger than mine,’ I comment.

‘You’ll catch up, in a year or two,’ you say kindly.

I remove my hand, and it feels different somehow, as though the fullness of your breast has left an impression in my palm.

‘Have you started yet?’ you ask.

‘Last year,’ I say, ‘but they aren’t regular. Every three months or so.’

‘Mine came when I was twelve,’ you say. ‘I thought I was dying. I ran to the school nurse in tears, and she gave me some rags and explained what it was.’

‘I can’t believe. .’ I nearly say, your mother didn’t tell you, then I remember your mother is dead, ‘. . you didn’t know.’ There’s a tickling in my throat so I turn my head and lightly cough. Then I ask the question I wanted to ask when you put my hand on your breast: ‘Do you ever touch yourself?’

‘Touch myself?’

‘You don’t ever touch yourself. .? Down there?’

‘No.’

You sound appalled, and I regret mentioning it. But then you ask, ‘What’s it like?’

I hesitate, then say, ‘It starts when I think of a man, like Teacher Wu, kissing me, and down there feels good. So I rub and rub and the feeling grows stronger, until this spasm comes. . I sleep in the same bed as my mother, so I usually wait until she is snoring. . Sometimes I stop halfway through, scared I have woken her. .’

You don’t say anything. What are you thinking? That I am a pervert? A sexual degenerate?

‘I. . I feel bad afterwards,’ I stammer. ‘So I will stop this bad habit. I will keep my thoughts Socialist and pure, and loyal to the motherland.’

You remain silent and I start to panic. What was I thinking? You are Zhang Liya, leader of our school’s detachment of the Communist Youth League. You will report me on Monday, and I will be ordered to write a confession of my bourgeois self-pleasuring and read it in assembly. Teacher Wu will be disgusted. I will be expelled and perhaps even sent to a prison for juvenile sex offenders. My mother will hang herself in shame.

‘What do you rub?’ you whisper. ‘What is this spasm?’ You reach for my hand, resting on the pillow, and tug it down under the bedcovers. ‘Show me how.’

At the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls, you behave like a stranger to me. But though you shun me in the classrooms and halls, I know that I am your closest friend. Though you and Long March walk arm in arm in the yard, I know she is your rival and wants your position as leader of the Youth League. (‘Long March would push me off a cliff if she had the chance.’) Though you and Resist America share a bowl of noodles in the dining hall, you have never bathed with Resist America, or washed her hair with your stepmother’s expensive shampoo. Though you and Patriotic Hua plan the agenda for Youth League meetings together, you have never shown Patriotic Hua the black and white photograph of your mother, or turned the white bust of Chairman Mao to the wall before dancing cheek to cheek with her to ballads from Hong Kong. Though you praise Soviet Chen’s singing of the latest revolutionary opera, you have never hooked your leg over Soviet Chen’s under the bedcovers and whispered, ‘We are like a pair of chopsticks. We belong together.’

Though you ignore me, I know I am your most intimate friend. Though at school I am as ostracized as ever, the spring of 1966 is the happiest of my life.

We spend every Saturday night together until May, when I don’t see you for three weekends in a row. There are rumours that the Party has handed down directives to the student leaders to be more revolutionary. There are rumours of a coming political storm. And I know these Party commands are keeping you away.

The first Saturday in June you knock for me, exhausted after a ten-hour Youth League meeting. The evening is hot, and we go to Ironmongers Lane and soak in a tub of tepid water. When I ask you about the rumours, you say, ‘There’s going to be a reform of the education system. I am prohibited from saying any more than that. But don’t worry, Moon. I will keep you safe.’

After dinner, we lie on your bed and go to sleep. Hours later I am woken by the floorboards creaking as you pace up and down, lost in thought. The moon-cast shadows of the tree outside the window reach across your body, the branches stroking your breasts and hips and reaching as though to strangle your neck. I drift off again, and wake before daybreak to see you kneeling by the loose floorboard and staring at the black and white photo of your dead mother. Are you too excited to sleep? Or too scared?

I am scared. In every political campaign, it’s the rightists who suffer most.

II

On Monday when I arrive at school the playground is crowded with girls gazing up at large sheets of paper dripping with black ink pasted to the gate and the school walls.

Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

Time for a Revolution in Education.

The Rightist Intellectual Headteacher Yang Must No Longer Dominate Our School with Her Capitalist Agenda.

We stare at the posters, confused. Who vandalized the playground? Where are the teachers? Why hasn’t the bell rung for lessons? Only the Youth League members look as though they know what is going on. You and Long March, Red Star and Patriotic Hua stand with authority, watching your classmates’ reactions to the slogans in black ink.

‘Why hasn’t the bell rung?’ someone asks.

‘Lessons are cancelled,’ Long March says.

‘But the high school entrance exams are next month,’ complains Ying Le, who wants to go to medical school and train to be a doctor. ‘How are we supposed to study for them?’

‘The high school entrance exams have been abolished!’ Long March snaps. ‘The education system is being reformed. The teachers have been teaching the revisionist anti-Party line for long enough!’

You stand on the stage in the auditorium in front of hundreds of girls. Your hair has been shorn like a boy’s and you wear a PLA jacket over your uniform. You look very military and tough as you hold a loudspeaker to your mouth and say, ‘We have it on good authority that there are Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts on the faculty of our school.’

There are outraged gasps. Fearful murmurs. Confusion. Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts are spirits from folktales and myths that assume human form and do mischief. Do you really believe that our teachers are evil spirits?

‘Many of our teachers are counter-revolutionaries,’ you say, ‘pretending to support the Party while indoctrinating us with the anti-Party line. The education system must be reformed to weed these bad elements out. Until the Cultural Revolution Committee decides upon the next course of action, all teachers have been suspended.’

The whispers of hundreds of girls sweep through the auditorium, as though your words are a strong breeze rustling the leaves of a tree. ‘The teachers are suspended?’ ‘What about exams?’ ‘What’s the Cultural Revolution?’

‘Class time will now be devoted to revolutionary activities,’ you say through the crackling loudspeaker. ‘Every student is to give her blood, sweat and tears to the Cultural Revolution!’

Long March strides towards you on the stage and you hand the loudspeaker over to her. ‘The black-category students, with rightist, landlord or capitalist blood lineage will not participate in the revolutionary activities!’ she says. ‘The black-category students will be segregated to the back of every classroom. They will study the collected works of Mao Zedong. They will write self-criticisms and reform their thinking!’

Standing beside Long March, you nod as though in agreement. You nod as though our segregation is fair and right.

Our classroom becomes a Big-character Poster production line. Black ink smudges the faces and hands of nearly every student as they use calligraphy brushes to make posters denouncing our former teachers. Red Star has been appointed a ‘Big-character Poster Inspector’ and Ying Le’s poster does not meet her standards.

‘“Teacher Zhao Must Evict Any Thoughts that Contradict the Party Line from Her Heart. .”’ Red Star reads scornfully. ‘What’s this meant to be? A love poem?’

‘But I can’t think of any anti-Party crimes Teacher Zhao has committed,’ Ying Le says honestly. ‘She was a dedicated Communist.’

‘Stop thinking like an intellectual and think like a rebel,’ Red Star scolds. ‘Teacher Zhao deceived us into thinking she was a loyal Communist when really she was teaching us her revisionist curriculum!’

Ying Le bows her head. She wants to be a doctor, not a rebel. Red Star snatches the calligraphy brush from her and scrawls, ‘Teacher Zhao Must Be Torn Limb from Limb for Challenging the Doctrine of Chairman Mao!’

‘There!’ she says. ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and you, Dr Ying, better hurry up and learn which end goes bang. Or I’ll put you at the back of class with those Stinking Rightists over there.’ Red Star looks over at the black-category students, and catches me looking up from my desk. ‘Who gave you permission to look at me?’ she snaps. ‘Take your beady little capitalist eyes off me!’

I bury my head back in my exercise book.

Industriously Study Mao Zedong Thought, as Mao Zedong Thought is the Sole Criterion of Truth.

Long March has ordered us to write this ten thousand times without mistakes, and I have just completed my hundredth line. If Mao Zedong Thought is the sole criterion of truth, I think, then what about the five thousand years of civilization before Chairman Mao? For five thousand years was everything false? Of course, I keep my doubts to myself.

‘Women hold up half the sky. Women are as revolutionary as men. We of the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls reject femininity. We will roll up our sleeves and spit and curse! We won’t bathe or wash our clothes. Soap is bourgeois! The sweat of the masses is revolutionary! We will breed dirt under our fingernails and behind our ears! We will emancipate ourselves from the shackles of our sex!’

Waving scissors above her head, Little Miao lectures us from the teaching platform. Miao has no problem ‘rejecting femininity’, as for years Miao has been as aggressive, foul-mouthed and unwashed as the roughest of boys. Shopkeepers call her ‘young man’, and children in the street call her ‘Elder Brother’. Proud to be a tomboy, Little Miao never corrects their mistake. And now, scissors in hand, she intends for the rest of us to ‘reject femininity’ too.

The long-haired girls go to Little Miao and she turns them into short-haired girls, one by one, hacking with the scissors, steely-eyed, as though hair itself is the enemy. The ‘revolutionary haircuts’ are awful, but who dares complain? Little Miao holds up every severed pigtail and we cheer as though they are enemy scalps. When it is my turn, Little Miao is vicious with me.

‘Times have changed, Daughter of a Rightist!’ she shouts, cutting away. ‘From now on, haircuts must be short, practical and revolutionary!’ When her scissors have done their worst, she shoves me off the teaching platform. ‘Not so pretty now, eh? Go weep some capitalist tears over your lovely bourgeois locks!’ she calls after me.

But Little Miao is wrong. I couldn’t care less about my hair. The only person who cares is you. As I go back to my desk, I catch you staring at my short and stubbly head with sad, sentimental eyes.

I want to laugh in your face. My hair is the least of my problems right now.

In July, Teacher Zhao shuffles back into class to go on trial for her counter-revolutionary crimes and we see she has lost weight and now has more salt than pepper in her hair. As Teacher Zhao stands before us in her thick spectacles and chalk-dusty Mao jacket, patched and patched again, I remember her passionate teachings about Communism and can’t shake the conviction that Teacher Zhao is a loyal Maoist from my mind.

‘Comrades!’ Long March yells. ‘Teacher Zhao is a traitor to the People’s Republic, and opposed to the correct policy of our Great Leader Chairman Mao! This meeting, on 16 July 1966, is to denounce Teacher Zhao and her anti-Party teachings. But before we start, let’s give Teacher Zhao a chance to confess her crimes.’

Confronted by the fury of her former students, Teacher Zhao is shaking. But she speaks with her chin up, righteous and strong. ‘Comrades,’ she begins, ‘I am the daughter of poor peasants. My family background is revolutionary. My father fought the Japanese devils in the Eighth Route Army. My brother fought the American running dogs in the Korean War. I live a humble spinster’s life, devoted to the teaching and practice of Communism. I am not opposed to the Party, and I have never committed any crime. Therefore I have nothing to confess. Long live Chairman Mao!’

‘Class Enemy Zhao!’ Long March shouts. ‘You are in contempt of the People’s Court! You must assume the correct attitude of repentance and confess!’

‘Down with Teacher Zhao!’ Red Star chants. ‘No leniency to those who won’t confess!’

The rest of the class chants with Red Star, banging on desk lids and scaring Teacher Zhao out of her wits. When the chanting stops, Long March reads Teacher Zhao her crimes — the findings of the Cultural Revolution Committee’s investigation into her teaching and conduct: ‘1. Teacher Zhao is a loyal running dog of the Nationalists. 2. Teacher Zhao is a Nationalist spy. 3. Teacher Zhao is part of the plot to overthrow the Communist Party by taking over the military.’

Teacher Zhao stares at Long March, stunned. Long March then tells Teacher Zhao of the evidence we have. One day last October Teacher Zhao had chalked ‘Use Maoist Thought to Criticize Maoist Thought’ on the blackboard instead of ‘Use Maoist Thought to Criticize Bourgeois Thought’. Teacher Zhao had laughed and corrected her mistake. But it was too late. A slip of the chalk had shown us evidence of her secret anti-Party agenda.

‘Well, Class Enemy Zhao?’ Long March spits fiercely. ‘Did you or did you not write “Use Maoist Thought to Criticize Maoist Thought” on the blackboard last October? Think carefully before you answer. There are twenty-eight witnesses here in this room who will testify that you did.’

For the next three hours Teacher Zhao defends herself against the charges. Though she looks scared stiff when the class breaks into chanting ‘Down with Teacher Zhao!’ she still won’t confess. Eventually, Long March screams, ‘I am sick of this rightist whore!’ and slaps Teacher Zhao so hard she knocks her glasses off and sends them shattering to the floor. The class descends into silence. For a student to hit a teacher is an unthinkable thing. But Teacher Zhao hangs her head and does not reprimand Long March.

‘I am sick of Teacher Zhao’s lies,’ Long March spits. ‘As the Great Helmsman said, “To stain our hands with our enemies’ blood is an honour!” Comrades! The Anti-black Gang Capitalist rally has begun outside. Let’s take her out!’

The Ox Freaks and Snake Monsters are paraded around the running track behind the school. Tall dunce hats are placed on their heads and placards hung around their necks: Down with Headteacher Yang! Down with Black Gangster Zhao! The teachers are handed pots and pans, which they are forced to bang in percussion as they straggle around the field.

A third-year girl called Shaoli shrieks the headteacher’s crimes through a loudspeaker: ‘Headteacher Yang Attempted to Overthrow the Communist Government and Take Over the Military! Headteacher Yang Attempted to Assassinate Chairman Mao!’

Headteacher Yang is stony-faced and unrepentant. Shaoli calls over Teacher Wu and tells him to slap the headteacher. When he refuses, a second-year girl beats him with a broom. They call over Teacher Zhao and, scared of being beaten too, she slaps Headteacher Yang to loud cheers. ‘Harder! Harder!’ shout their former pupils. Shaoli orders Headteacher Yang and Teacher Zhao to knock heads, and they headbutt each other like rams. ‘Harder!’ Shaoli shouts through the loudspeaker, like a ringmaster in a circus of humiliation and cruelty.

Keen to lead the Anti-black Gang Capitalist rally, you take the loudspeaker from Shaoli, punch your fist in the air and shout, ‘The iron fist of the proletariat will crush the enemies of Chairman Mao! Heads will roll! Blood will flow! But we will never let go of Mao Zedong Thought! Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!’

And hundreds of girls punch their fists up to the sky and shout, ‘Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!’

You hurl your clenched fist up again: ‘Long Live the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls!’

And I have no choice but to flail my fist to the heavens and shout with everyone else: ‘Long Live the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls!’

That night I can’t sleep. I close my eyes and see Teacher Wu bleeding from his head as the second-year girl beats him with a broom. I see Teacher Lin on her hands and knees, her tongue lapping at Resist America’s boot leather. I see Teacher Zhao being slapped hard in the face by Long March, and her glasses shattering on the classroom floor.

I slip out of bed at daybreak and go to the Zhang residence in Ironmongers Lane. Though it’s not yet six o’clock, you are up and seated on the bench in the yard. Comrade Zhang Liya, leader of the newly established Red Guard of the Anticapitalist School for Revolutionary Girls, looking ready to fight the class enemies with your PLA uniform, red-star beret and militant gaze. Then you see me and break into a wide smile. We haven’t spoken in weeks. Not since the Cultural Revolution began.

‘Yi Moon,’ you smile. ‘How are you?’

I smile back thinly and say, ‘I am well, thank you. I have become very practised at writing Thought Reports and using the scalpel of Mao Zedong Thought to excise the malignant tumours of rightist thought from my mind. I can write Thought Reports in my sleep.’

‘Good,’ you say, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘Keep your political consciousness strong.’

‘How about you, Comrade Zhang?’ I ask. ‘Is the revolution progressing as you hoped?’

‘Progress has been satisfactory,’ you say, your eyes shining, ‘but there is more work to be done. For now we must spread the revolution beyond our schools, to the streets of Beijing. But we Red Guards will rise to the challenge. We Red Guards will fight to protect our Great Leader Chairman Mao from the capitalist roaders who attack him.’

‘I’d rather have adventures than learn from books,’ you told me in the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. Back then, your ambition had impressed me. Back then, I hadn’t known ‘have adventures’ meant persecuting and terrorizing innocent people.

‘Liya. .’ I say, ‘do you really think that Teacher Zhao was spying for the Nationalists and plotting to overthrow the Communist Party?’

‘The Cultural Revolution Committee of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls has these allegations under investigation,’ you respond.

‘But what evidence is there?’

‘The allegations are under investigation.’

Frustrated by your stilted, official speech, I cry out, ‘Every time I close my eyes, I see Teacher Lin licking Resist America’s boots, or Headteacher Yang being slapped in the face. Can’t you see how awful it is? We have stopped being humans. We are worse than beasts!’

Under your red-star cap, your eyes are stern. ‘You sympathize with the rightists because your father is a rightist,’ you say. ‘Restore your red status, and you would throw yourself into the Cultural Revolution tomorrow.’

‘My father is not a rightist!’ I correct. ‘My father’s department had to expel a quota of rightists. That’s why he was arrested and sent away. He did nothing wrong.’

You shake your head, as though at my naivety, and say, ‘Do you really think they’d send your father to a labour camp if he hadn’t committed a crime?’

A servant enters the courtyard with a teakwood tray of rice porridge, steamed buns and soy milk. The servant girl, who is our age, lowers the tray beside you on the bench then retreats, walking backwards like a eunuch before the Emperor. You don’t thank her, or even nod to acknowledge her, your chin propped up high by your sense of entitlement. How can you pretend to be one of the masses? I think scornfully. How can you pretend to be one of the proletariat, when you live like this?

I turn to leave. I don’t bother to say goodbye. ‘Wait!’ you cry. You come after me, catching me by my shoulder at the gate. I turn around, expecting an apology for what you said about my father. Tenderness returns to your eyes as you stroke my head. ‘Sorry they cut your hair,’ you say. ‘You used to have such beautiful hair. But that bitch Miao butchered it.’

Who gives a damn about my hair? I want to scream. I step back, disgusted, and your eyes turn sad.

‘Yi Moon, I want you to know,’ you say, ‘I am protecting you and your mother. I am keeping you safe.’

‘My mother and I don’t need you to protect us,’ I mutter as I turn and walk out the gate.

Your laughter pursues me down Ironmongers Lane: ‘If only you knew. .’

The Smash the Four Olds movement begins, and the Red Guards take over the streets of Beijing, intent on destroying the Old Culture, Old Society, Old Education and Old Ways of Thinking. Red Guards stand at intersections, shouting the quotations of Chairman Mao through loudspeakers. Red Guards hijack buses and lecture the passengers about the Ox Freaks and Snake Monsters in their midst. Red Guards armed with knives chase after people in western clothes, slashing their American-style shirts and dresses to shreds.

Destroy the Capitalists Street. All Hail the Red Guards Lane. The East is Red Boulevard. All over Beijing, street names are changed to revolutionary slogans. Shops selling paintings, ornaments and other ‘poisonous weeds of the capitalist classes’ are smashed up and portraits of Chairman Mao displayed in the windows. Signs saying Masses Beware! For Tens of Years This Shop Has Exploited the Sweat and Blood of the Workers! appear over shop doorways. The Red Guards ‘liberate’ the shop assistants from their managers, who are beaten to the floor. The Red Guards change the traffic-light system so revolutionary red means ‘go’ and green means ‘stop’. The Red Guards then persecute the victims of the resulting traffic accidents, for ‘clinging to the Old Culture and Old Ways of Thinking’.

Red Guards from Beijing University stand in our alley, halting passers-by and ordering them to quote Chairman Mao. They stop my mother, who nervously stammers, ‘Serve the People!’ (choosing the simplest quote, because those who misquote the Great Helmsman are beaten). The Red Guards stop Idiot Zhu from the junk yard, who, when asked for a quote, laughs and says, ‘Chairman Mao stinks of dog farts!’ The students take off their leather belts and beat the giggling Idiot Zhu, yelling, ‘Enemy of Chairman Mao! You deserve to die!’ They eventually drag Idiot Zhu off to jail, and we don’t see or hear of him again.

The home raids begin. Teenage fists bang bang bang on our courtyard gate, and my mother and I rush panicking around our room, hiding bamboo mah-jong tiles, father’s calligraphy and anything that could be labelled ‘poisonous weeds’. The Red Guards break the gate down and we are certain we are done for. But as we cower behind our locked door, we overhear them say, ‘What about the rightist Yi family?’

‘Zhang Liya struck them off the list. Besides, the Yi family don’t have a pot to piss in.’

And the twenty or so Red Guards storm into Granny Xi’s room instead.

Landscape paintings, Qing Dynasty vases, classic novels and land deeds to old properties in the city — the Red Guards drag a haul of riches out of Granny Xi’s room. Though Granny Xi petitioned to have my mother and me evicted, I can’t help but pity the old woman as she is dragged out and forced to kneel in the yard. Mother and I peek out the window as a pimply teenage boy slaps Granny Xi in the face with her Nationalist-era land deeds.

‘You kept these land deeds hoping that the Nationalists would return, didn’t you?’ he accuses. ‘You are hoping the Nationalists will come back and restore your status as a landlord, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ says Granny Xi, ‘I hate the Nationalists. I just forgot to throw them away.’

The Red Guard unbuckles his belt and tugs it out of the trouser loops. He lashes the strip of leather down on Granny Xi’s back and my mother gasps, ‘She’s eighty-four!’

They make a fire of Granny Xi’s poisonous weeds and force her to kneel close to her burning furniture and books so that the smoke makes her cough and the heat blisters her skin. When the Red Guards leave, carting Granny Xi’s valuables, or ‘Ill-gotten Gains of the Exploiting Classes’, off in a wheelbarrow, we go outside to help Granny Xi to her feet. Though she has long detested us, Granny Xi does not resist as my mother and I bring her into our room. The old woman collapses on a chair, her cheeks smudged with smoke, and her white hair and eyebrows singed. Mother kneels by Granny Xi and squeezes her wrinkled hand.

‘Do you love Chairman Mao with all your heart?’ she asks gently. ‘If you let that love shine out of your heart, Red Guards will leave you alone.’

And Granny Xi looks at my mother with such watery, defeated eyes I am nostalgic for the days they seethed at us with hate.

Every day the black-category students go to school. Every day we study Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, write our Thought Reports and clean the school building. I am put on toilet-cleaning duty. Though I scrub the toilet bowls with my toothbrush every day for weeks, the pubic hairs, bloody sanitary napkins and faecal smears never cease to make me gag. But I can’t slack off, because Martial Spirit comes to inspect my work.

‘Why the vinegar-drinking face, Stinking Rightist? Too bourgeois to clean toilets, are you?’

Comrade Martial Spirit, formerly my mousy, twitchy classmate Socialist Flower, has become a monster since her promotion to jailer-in-command of the Cattle Shed. As I crouch by the toilet with a toothbrush in my hand, Martial Spirit sneers, ‘Scrub harder, Rightist! Or I’ll kick the capitalist airs and graces right out of you!’

My other duty is to feed the Black-gang Capitalists, incarcerated in the Cattle Shed. The Cattle Shed is the former music room, and the Black-gang Capitalists are our former teachers, now subject to interrogation for their crimes.

‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ I yell, entering the Cattle Shed with a tray of rice bowls.

‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ the teachers croak back, vocal cords ragged from screaming.

The Cattle Shed smells of unwashed bodies and fear-loosened bladders and bowels. ‘Long Live the Red Terror!’ has been finger-painted in blood on the wall, above the portrait of Chairman Mao. Weeks of intimidation have broken the teachers down. They cringe behind their desks with bruised eyes, obedient as whipped dogs. I serve the bowls of rice and their chopsticks tremble as they eat.

There are fewer Black-gang Capitalists now than at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Headteacher Yang was the first to die. The Cattle Shed jailers accidentally kicked her to death during an interrogation, and were out of their minds with panic afterwards. But there were no repercussions, and the next time they murdered a teacher they knew they had nothing to fear. Some Black-gang Capitalists commit suicide. I was the one who found Teacher Zhao’s corpse in the toilets, swinging from the leaky water pipes. Her salt-and-pepper head was bent over the noose and her toes swayed over the damp cement floor. A suicide note was pinned to her chalk-dusty Mao jacket:

I am an Enemy of the People.

In order not to poison the masses, I will exterminate myself from society.

Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

Long Live Chairman Mao!

I went to Headteacher Yang’s former office, now the headquarters of the Cattle Shed jailers, to break the news. Comrade Martial Spirit reacted with dismay.

‘Teacher Zhao is a traitor of the revolution,’ she spat. ‘Had I known she was going to commit suicide, I’d have strangled her first!’

Sometimes when I am cleaning the toilets, I remember the time we spent together and my chest becomes tight. I remember how your eyes shone in the darkness of your room and the spine-tingling caress of your words as you murmured, ‘If only I had been born a boy, Yi Moon. Then I could marry you one day.’ I remember the secret transactions our bodies made in your bed at night, and how your touch suffused every part of me with pleasure, unspoken of during the day. But now the Liya of that time no longer exists. Now you are a Red Guard, spreading terror throughout Beijing, and it’s as though that time never was.

Since the suicide of Teacher Zhao, toilet-cleaning duty has become a break from the chaos of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls, for in spite of the brave new Socialist claims to not fear ‘Heaven or Hell, Gods or ghosts’, old superstitions die hard and girls stay away from the ‘haunted’ toilet block in droves. I am not scared of Teacher Zhao’s ghost though. Every time I scrub the stall where she dangled from the pipes, I speak to her.

‘You were a good person, Teacher Zhao,’ I say. ‘You never committed any counter-revolutionary crimes. They were wrong to persecute you.’

Silence.

‘I don’t blame you, Teacher Zhao,’ I say. ‘There’s only so much suffering we can endure. I understand why you hanged yourself.’

Silence.

‘I envy you, Teacher Zhao. If I had the guts, I’d find a length of rope and betray the revolution too. .’

The thought of ‘betraying the revolution’ becomes more seductive by the day. I imagine affixing the rope to the pipes and kicking the upturned mop bucket out from under my feet. I imagine the noose squeezing my neck until the moment of release. It’s only the thought of my mother that stops me, and I can’t help but resent her for holding me back.

Autumn. The sky is bled dry of colour. Leaves wither and wilt from the branches of trees. They rustle under my shoes as I walk into the playground and see a new Big-character Poster on the notice board:

Down with Zhang Liya! Daughter of a Loyal Running Dog of Liu Shaoqi!

Since the Cultural Revolution began there have been many sudden reversals in status. A people’s hero one day can be persecuted as the people’s enemy the next. But this is so unexpected I nearly fall down in shock.

Zhang Liya Must Be Brought to Justice for Her Anti-Party Crimes.

Down with Zhang Liya, Part of Liu Shaoqi’s Plot to Assassinate Chairman Mao.

Girls crowd around the Big-character Posters. There are some half-hearted murmurs — ‘How dare Zhang Liya betray us!’ But most girls stare up at the posters in a subdued mood. After weeks of class struggle, revolutionary spirit is flagging.

The Red Guards are back. Long March, Patriotic Hua and Red Star — now known as Dare to Rebel, Red Soldier and Martial Warrior. The Red Guards have shaved their heads. Their khaki uniforms, unwashed or changed in weeks, are nearly black. Their eyes are hardened and they are more like veterans back from fighting a war than sixteen-year-old girls. Long March, now known as Comrade Dare to Rebel, has a loudspeaker in one hand, and a People’s Daily in the other, opened to an editorial about the latest Communist Party purge. She waves the newspaper about as she rants into the loudspeaker.

‘Though her father has been expelled from the Party and is now in prison for anti-Party crimes, Zhang Liya remains free and hiding out in the bourgeois luxury of her home. Zhang Liya must be brought to justice. We must bring her into school for interrogation! Down with Zhang Liya!’

‘Down with Zhang Liya!’ Long March yells.

‘Down with Zhang Liya! Down with Zhang Liya!’ chant the schoolgirls in the playground — but obediently and bored.

The Red Guards, led by Comrade Dare to Rebel, turn and march out of the gate. Before I have the chance to think about what I am doing, I have caught up with Long March and tapped her on the shoulder. She wrinkles her nose at me, as though I am a cockroach or a rat.

‘Comrade Dare to Rebel,’ I say, ‘I have been to the Zhang family residence and have seen poisonous weeds of the Nationalist era hidden in Zhang Liya’s bedroom.’

I half expect to be cursed or slapped for daring to speak to her. But Long March frowns, thinking over what I said. ‘Then you must come with us, Comrade Yi Moon,’ she says urgently. ‘You must come with us and show us where the poisonous weeds are hidden. They will be used as evidence against Zhang Liya in her trial.’

Pride swells in my chest. ‘Comrade Yi Moon’, she called me. Not ‘Capitalist Roader’ or ‘Daughter of a Rightist’, but ‘Comrade Yi Moon’.

I follow the Red Guards out of the playground, to Ironmongers Lane and your home.

The Red Guards’ clenched fists bang bang bang on your front gate.

‘Open up, you Sons of Bitches! Open up, you loyal running dogs of Liu Shaoqi!’

Your servant girl unlocks and opens the gate and cries, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao! Long Live Chairman Mao! Don’t attack me! I am just a servant exploited by bourgeois Zhang family!’

The Red Guards ignore the girl’s whimpering and stampede to your room.

You are waiting in a chair by the window. Your striking face shows no sign of fear or intimidation as twenty Red Guards chanting ‘Down with Zhang Liya!’ stomp their heavy boots into your room. You sit in your PLA uniform, and regard the mob of Red Guards with the dignity and composure that made you the natural choice for their leader. You have been expecting them.

‘Class Enemy Zhang!’ Long March yells. ‘You must come with us for interrogation and trial. Do you know why?’

You nod. You look older. Like the other Red Guards, the weeks of destroying the Four Olds have aged you. ‘Yes, Comrade Dare to Rebel, I do.’

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.