Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

18. "More Than Gigantic Wonderful News"

I found an excuse to get out of school, and was home again the next morning. The apariment was empty. My father was in detention. My mother, grandmother, and Xiao-fang were in Peking. My teenage siblings were living their own, separate lives elsewhere.

Jin-ming had resented the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning. He was in the same school as me, and was in his first year. He wanted to become a scientist, but this was denounced by the Cultural Revolution as 'bourgeois."

He and some boys in his form had formed a gang before the Cultural Revolution. They loved adventure and mystery, and had called themselves the "Iron-Wrought Brotherhood." Jin-ming was their number-one brother. He was tall, and brilliant at his studies. He had been giving his form weekly magic shows using his chemistry knowledge, and had been openly skipping lessons which he was not interested in or which he had already gone beyond.

And he was fair and generous to the other boys.

When the school Red Guard organization was set up on August, Jin-ming's 'brotherhood' was merged into it.

He and his gang were given the job of printing leaflets and distributing them on the streets. The leaflets had been written by older Red Guards in their mid-teens and typically had rifles like "Founding Declaration of the First Brigade of the First Army Division of the Red Guards of the Number Four School' (all Red Guard organizations had grand names), "Solemn Statement' (a pupil announced he was changing his name to "Huang the Guard for Chairman Mao'), "More Than Gigantic Wonderful News' (a member of the Cultural Revolution Authority had just given an audience to some Red Guards), and "The Latest Most Supreme Instructions' (a word or two by Mao had just been leaked out).

Jin-ming was soon bored stiff by this gibberish. He started to absent himself from his missions, and became interested in a girl of his age, thirteen. She seemed to him the perfect lady beautiful, gentle, and slightly aloof, with a touch of shyness. He did not approach her, but was content to admire her from afar.

One day the pupils in his form were summoned to go on a house raid. The older Red Guards said something about 'bourgeois intellectuals." All members of the family were declared prisoners and ordered to gather in one room while the Red Guards searched the rest of the house.

Jin-ming was appointed to watch the family. To his delight, the girl was the other 'jailer."

There were three 'prisoners': a middle-aged man and his son and daughter-in-law. They had obviously been expecting the raid, and sat with resigned expressions on their faces, staring into Jin-ming's eyes as though into space. Jin-ming felt very awkward under their gaze, and he was also uneasy because of the presence of the girl, who looked bored and kept glancing toward the door. When she saw several boys carrying a huge wooden case full of porcelain, she mumbled to Jin-ming that she was going to have a look, and left the room.

Facing his captives alone, Jin-ming felt his discomfort growing. Then the woman prisoner stood up and said she wanted to go and breast-feed her baby in the next room.

Jin-ming readily agreed.

The moment she left the room, the object of Jin-ming's affection rushed in. Sternly, she asked him why a prisoner was at large. When Jin-ming said he had given permission, she yelled at him for being 'soft on class enemies." She was wearing a leather belt on what Jin-ming had thought of as her 'willowy' waist. Now she pulled it off and pointed it at his nose a stylized Red Guard posture while she screamed at him. Jin-ming was struck dumb. The girl was unrecognizable. All of a sudden she was far from gentle, shy, or lovely. She was all hysterical ugliness. Thus was Jin-ming's first love extinguished.

But he shouted back. The girl left the room and returned with an older Red Guard, the leader of the group. He started yelling so much his spittle splashed on Jinming, and he too pointed his rolled-up belt at him. Then he stopped, realizing that they should not be washing their dirty linen in front of class enemies. He ordered Jin-ming to go back to the school to 'wait for adjudication."

That evening, the Red Guards in Jin-ming's form held a meeting without him. When the boys came back to the dormitory, their eyes avoided his. They behaved distantly for a couple of days. Then they told Jin-ming they had been arguing with the militant girl. She had reported Jin-ming's 'surrender to the class enemies' and had insisted that he be given a severe punishment. But the Iron-Wrought Brotherhood defended him. Some of them resented the girl, who had been terribly aggressive toward other boys and girls too.

Still, Jin-ming was punished: he was ordered to pull out grass alongside the 'blacks' and 'grays." Mao's instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower because of the grass's obstinate nature. This fortuitous by offered a form of punishment for the newby created 'class enemies."

Jin-ming pulled up grass only for a few days. His Iron Wrought Brotherhood could not bear to see him suffer.

But he had been classified as a 'sympathizer with class enemies," and was never sent on any more raids, which suited him fine. He soon embarked on a journey with his brotherhood sight-seeing all over the country, taking in China 's rivers and mountains, but, unlike most Red Guards, Jin-ming never made the pilgrimage to Peking to see Mao. He did not come home until the end of,966.

My sister Xiao-hong, at fifteen, was a founding member of the Red Guards at her school. But she was only one among hundreds, as the school was crammed with officials' children, many of them competing to be active. She hated and feared the atmosphere of militancy and violence so much that she was soon on the verge of a nervous collapse.

She came home to ask my parents for help at the beginning of September, only to find they were not there: my father was in detention and my mother had gone to Peking. My grandmother's anxiety made her even more scared, so she returned to her school. She volunteered to help 'guard' the school library, which had been ransacked and sealed, like the one at my school. She spent her days and nights reading, devouring all the forbidden fruits she could. It was this that held her together. In mid-September, she set out on a long tour around the country with her friends and like Jin-ming she did not come home until the end of the year.

My brother Xiao-her was almost twelve, and was at the same key primary school I had attended. When the Red Guards were formed in the middle schools, Xiao-her and his friends were eager to join. To them the Red Guards meant freedom to live away from home, staying up all night, and power over adults. They went to my school and begged to be allowed into the Red Guards. To get rid of them, one Red Guard said off-handedly, "You can form the First Army Division of Unit 4969." So Xiao-her became the head of the Propaganda Department of a troop of twenty boys, all the others being 'commander," 'chief of staff," and so on. There were no privates.

Xiao-her joined in hitting teachers twice. One of the victims was a sports teacher, who had been condemned as a 'bad element." Some girls of Xiao-her's age had accused the teacher of touching their breasts and thighs during gym lessons. So the boys set upon him, not least to impress the girls. The other teacher was the moral tutor. As corporal punishment was banned in schools, she would complain to the parents, who would beat their sons.

One day, the boys set out on a house raid, and were assigned to go to a household which was rumored to be that of an ex-Kuomintang family. They did not know what exactly they were supposed to do there. Their heads had been filled with vague notions of finding something like a diary saying how the family longed for Chiang Kai-shek's comeback and hated the Communist Party.

The family had five sons, all well-built and tough looking They stood by the door, arms akimbo, and looked down at the boys with their most intimidating stares. Only one boy attempted to tiptoe in. One of the sons picked him up by the scruff of his neck and threw him out with one hand. This put an end to any further such 'revolutionary actions' by Xiao-her's 'division."

So, in the second week of October, while Xiao-her was living at his school and enjoying his freedom, Jin-ming and my sister were away traveling, and my mother and grandmother were in Peking, I was alone at home when one day, without warning, my father appeared on the doorstep.

It was an eerily quiet homecoming. My father was a changed person. He was abstracted and sunk deep in thought, and did not say where he had been or what had been happening to him. I listened to him pacing his room through sleepless nights, too frightened and worried to sleep myself. Two days later, to my tremendous relief, my mother returned from Peking with my grandmother and Xiao-fang.

My mother immediately went to my father's deparunent and handed Tao Zhu's letter to a deputy director. Straight away, my father was sent to a health clinic. My mother was allowed to go with him."

I went there to see them. It was a lovely place in the country, bordered on two sides by a beautiful green brook.

My father had a suite with a sitting room in which there was a row of empty bookshelves, a bedroom with a large double bed, and a bathroom with shiny white files. Outside his balcony, several osmanthus trees spread an intoxicating scent. When the breeze blew, tiny golden blossoms floated softly down to the grass less earth.

Both my parents seemed peaceful. My mother told me they went fishing in the brook every day. I felt they were safe, so I told them I was planning to leave for Peking to see Chairman Mao. I had longed to make this trip, like almost everybody else. But I had not gone because I felt I should be around to give my parents support.

Making the pilgrimage to Peking was very much encouraged and food, accommodations, and transport were all free. But it was not organized. I left Chengdu two days later with the five other girls from the reception office. As the train whistled north, my feelings were a mixture of excitement and nagging disquiet about my father. Outside the window, on the Chengdu Plain, some rice fields had been harvested, and squares of black soil shone among the gold, forming a rich patchwork. The countryside had been only marginally affected by the upheavals, in spite of repeated instigations by the Cultural Revolution Authority led by Mme Mao. Mao wanted the population fed so that they could 'make revolution," so he did not give his wife his full backing. The peasants knew that if they got involved and stopped producing food, they would be the first to starve, as they had learned in the famine only a few years before. The cottages among the green bamboo groves seemed as peaceful and idyllic as ever. The wind gently swayed the lingering smoke to form a crown over the graceful bamboo tips and the concealed chimneys. It was less than five months since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but my world had changed completely. I gazed out at the quiet beauty of the plain, and let a wistful mood envelop me. Fortunately, I did not have to worry about being criticized for being 'nostalgic," which was considered bourgeois, as none of the other girls had an accusing turn of mind. With them, I felt I could relax.

The prosperous Chengdu Plain soon gave way to low hills. The snowy mountains of west Sichuan glistened in the distance. Before very long we were traveling in and out of the tunnels through the towering Qjn Mountains, the wild range that cuts Sichuan off from the north of China.

With Tibet to the west, the hazardous Yangtze Gorges to the east, and the southern neighbors considered barbarians, Sichuan had always been rather self-contained, and the Sichuanese were known for their independent spirit. Mao had been concerned about their legendary inclination to seek some margin of independence, and had always made sure the province was in the firm grip of Peking.

After the Qjn Mountains, the scenery became dramatically different. The soft greenness gave way to harsh yellow earth, and the thatched cottages of the Chengdu Plain were replaced by rows of dry mud cave-huts. It was in caves like these that my father had spent five years as a young man.

We were only a hundred miles from Yan'an, where Mao had set up his headquarters after the Long March. It was there that my father dreamed his youthful dreams and became a devoted Communist. Thinking of him, my eyes became moist.

The journey took two days and a night. The attendants came to talk to us often and told us how envious they were that we would be seeing Chairman Mao soon.

At Peking Station huge slogans welcomed us as "Chairman Mao's guests." It was after midnight, yet the square in front of the station was lit up like daytime. Searchlights swept through the thousands and thousands of young people, all wearing red armbands and speaking often mutually unintelligible dialects. They were talking, shouting, giggling, and quarreling against the background of a gigantic chunk of stolid Soviet-style architecture the station itself. The only Chinese features were the pastiche pavilion like roofs on the two clock towers at each end.

As I stumbled drowsily out into the searchlights, I was enormously impressed by the building, its ostentatious grandeur and its shiny marbled modernity. I had been used to traditional dark timber columns and rough brick walls.

I looked back, and with a surge of emotion saw a huge portrait of Mao hanging in the center, under three golden characters, "Peking Station," in his calligraphy.

Loudspeakers directed us to the reception rooms in a corner of the station. In Peking, as in every other city in China, administrators were appointed to arrange food and accommodations for the traveling youngsters. Dormitories in universities, schools, hotels, and even offices were pressed into service. After waiting on line for hours, we were assigned to Qinghua University, one of the most prestigious in the country. We were taken there by coach and told that food would be provided in the canteen. The running of the gigantic machine for the millions of traveling youngsters was overseen by Zhou Enlai, who dealt with the daily chores with which Mao could not be bothered.

Without Zhou or somebody like him, the country and with it the Cultural Revolution would have collapsed, and Mao let it be known that Zhou was not to be attacked.

We were a very serious group, and all we wanted to do was to see Chairman Mao. Unfortunately, we had just missed his fifth review of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. What were we to do? Leisure activities and sightseeing were out irrelevant to the revolution. So we spent all our time on the campus copying wall posters. Mao had said that one purpose of traveling was to 'exchange information about the Cultural Revolution." That was what we would do: bring the slogans of the Peking Red Guards back to Chengdu.

Actually, there was another reason for not going out: transport was impossibly crowded and the university was out in the suburbs, about ten miles from the city center.

Still, we had to tell ourselves that our disinclination to move was correctly motivated.

Staying on the campus was intensely uncomfortable.

Even today I can still smell the latrines down the corridor from our room, which were so blocked that the water from the washbasins and urine and loosened excrement from the toilets flooded the tiled floor. Fortunately, the doorway to the latrines had a ridge, which prevented the stinking overflow from invading the corridor. The university administration was paralyzed, so there was nobody to get repairs done. But children from the countryside were still using the toilets: manure was not considered untouchable by peasants. When they trudged out, their shoes left highly odorous stains along the corridor and in the rooms.

A week passed, and still there was no news of another rally at which we could see Mao. Subconsciously desperate to get away from our discomfort, we decided to go to Shanghai to visit the site where the Communist Party had been founded in 19:zl, and then on to Mao's birthplace in Hunan, in south-central China.

These pilgrimages turned out to be hell: the trains were unbelievably packed. The dominance of the Red Guards by high officials' children was coming to an end, because their parents were beginning to come under attack as capitalist-roaders. The oppressed 'blacks' and 'grays' began to organize their own Red Guard groups and to travel. The color codes were beginning to lose their meaning. I rem em 4x 8 Wlore Than Gigantic Wonderful News' her meeting on one train a very beautiful, slim girl of about eighteen, with unusually big, velvet black eyes and long, thick eyelashes. As was the custom, we started by asking each other what 'family background' we were from. I was amazed at the unembarrassed manner with which this lovely girl replied that she was a 'black." And she seemed confidently to be expecting us 'red' girls to be friendly with her.

The six of us were very un militant in our behavior, and our seats were always the center of boisterous chatting.

The oldest member of our group was eighteen, and she was particularly popular. Everyone called her "Plumpie," as she was very well padded all around. She laughed a lot, with a deep, chesty, operafc sound. She sang a lot too, but, of course, only songs of Chairman Mao's quotations.

All songs except these and a few in praise of Mao were banned, like all other forms of entertainment, and remained so for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

This was the happiest I had been since the start of the Cultural Revolution, in spite of the persistent worry about my father and the agony involved in traveling. Every inch of space in the trains was occupied, even the luggage racks.

The toilet was jam-packed: no one could get in. Only our determination to see the holy sites of China sustained us.

Once, I desperately needed to relieve myself. I was sitting squeezed up next to a window, because five people were crammed onto a narrow seat made for three. With an incredible struggle I reached the toilet but when I got there I decided it was impossible to use it. Even if the boy who sat on the lid of the tank with his feet on the toilet seat cover could lift his legs for one moment, even if the girl who sat between his feet could somehow manage to be held up briefly by the others filling every usable space around her, I could not bring myself to do it in front of all these boys and girls. I returned to my seat on the verge of tears. Panic worsened the bursting sensation, and my legs were shaking. I resolved to use the toilet at the next stop.

After what seemed an interminable time, the train stopped at a small, dusk-enveloped station. The window was opened and I clambered out, but when I came back I found I could not get in.

I was perhaps the least athletic of us six. Previously, whenever I had had to climb into a train through the window, one of my friends had always lifted me from the platform while others pulled me from inside. This time, although I was being helped by about four people from inside, I could not hoist my body high enough to get my head and elbows in. I was sweating like mad, even though it was freezing cold. At this point, the train started to pull away. Panicking, I looked around to see if there was anyone who could help. My eyes fell on the thin, dark face of a boy who had sidled up beside me. But his intention was not to lend me a hand.

I had my purse in a pocket of my jacket, and because of my climbing position it was quite visible. With two fingers, the boy picked it out. He had presumably chosen the moment of departure to snatch it. I burst out crying. The boy paused. He looked at me, hesitated, and put the purse back. Then he took hold of my right leg and hoisted me up. I landed on the table as the train was beginning to pick up speed.

Because of this incident, I developed a soft spot for adolescent pickpockets. In the coming years of the Cultural Revolution, when the economy was in a shambles, theft was widespread, and I once lost a whole year's food coupons. But whenever I heard that policemen or other custodians of' law and order' had beaten a pickpocket, I always felt a pang. Perhaps the boy on that winter platform had shown more humanity than the hypocritical pillars of society.

Altogether we traveled about 2,000 miles on this trip, in a state of exhaustion such as I had never experienced in my life. We visited Mao's old house, which had been turned into a museum-cum-shrine. It was rather grand quite different from my idea of a lodging for exploited peasants, as I had expected it to be. A cap ton underneath an enormous photograph of Mao's mother said that she had been a very kind person and, because her family was relatively well off, had often given food to the poor. So our Great Leader's parents had been rich peasants! But rich peasants were class enemies! Why were Chairman Mao's parents heroes when other class enemies were objects of hate? The question frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it…

When we got back to Peking in mid-November, the capital was freezing. The reception offices were no longer at the station, because the area was too small for the huge number of youngsters now pouring in. A truck took us to a park where we spent the whole night waiting for accommodations to be allocated. We could not sit down because the ground was covered with frost and it was unbearably cold. I dozed off for a second or two standing up. I was not used to the harsh Peking winter and, having left home in the autumn, had not brought any winter clothes with me. The wind cut through my bones, and the night seemed never-ending. So did the line. It meandered around and around the ice-covered lake in the middle of the park.

Dawn came and went and we were still in line, absolutely exhausted. It was not until dusk fell that we reached our accommodations: the Central Drama School. Our room had once been used for singing classes. Now there were two rows of straw mattresses on the floor, no sheets or pillows. We were met by some air force officers, who said they had been sent by Chairman Mao to look after us and give us military training. We all felt very moved by the concern Chairman Mao showed us.

Military training for the Red Guards was a new development. Mao had decided to put a brake on the random destruction which he had unleashed. The hundreds of Red Guards lodged in the Drama School were organized into a 'regiment' by the air force officers. We struck up a good relationship with them, and liked two officers in particular, whose family backgrounds we learned at once, as was customary. The company commander had been a peasant from the north, while the political commissar came from an intellectual's family in the famous garden city of Suzhou. One day they proposed taking the six of us to the zoo, but asked us not to tell the others because their jeep could not hold any more people. Besides, they implied, they were not supposed to divert us to activities irrelevant to the Cultural Revolution. Not wanting to get them into trouble we declined, saying we wanted to 'stick to making revolution." The two officers brought us bagfuls of big ripe apples, which were seldom seen in Chengdu, and bunches of toffee-coated water chestnuts, which we had all heard of as a great Peking specialty. To repay their kindness, we sneaked into their bedroom and collected their dirty clothes, then washed them with great enthusiasm. I remember struggling with the big khaki uniforms, which were extremely heavy and hard in the icy water. Mao had told the people to learn from the armed forces, because he wanted everyone to be as regimented and indoctrinated with loyalty to him alone as the army was. Learning from servicemen had gone hand in hand with the promotion of affection for them, and numerous books, articles, songs, and dances featured girls helping soldiers by washing their clothes.

I even washed their underpants, but nothing sexual ever entered my mind. I suppose many Chinese girls of my generation were too dominated by the crushing political upheavals to develop adolescent sexual feelings. But not all. The disappearance of parental control meant it was a time of promiscuity for some. When I got back home I heard about a former classmate of mine, a pretty girl of fifteen, who went off traveling with some Red Guards from Peking. She had an affair on the way and came back pregnant. She was beaten by her father, followed by the accusing eyes of the neighbors, and enthusiastically gossiped about by her comrades. She hanged herself, leaving a note saying she was 'too ashamed to live." No one challenged this medieval concept of shame, which might have been a target of a genuine cultural revolution. But it was never one of Mao's concerns, and was not among the 'olds' which the Red Guards were encouraged to destroy.

The Cultural Revolution also produced a large number of militant puritans, mostly young women. Another girl from my form once received a love letter from a boy of sixteen. She wrote back calling him 'a traitor to the revolution': "How dare you think about such shameless things when the class enemies are still rampant, and people in the capitalist world still live in an abyss of misery!" Such a style was affected by many of the girls I knew. Because Mao called for girls to be militant, femininity was condemned in the years when my generation was growing up. Many girls tried to talk, walk, and act like aggressive, crude men, and ridiculed those who did not. There was not much possibility of expressing femininity anyway. To start with, we were not allowed to wear anything but the shapeless blue, grey or green trousers and jackets.

Our air force officers drilled us round and round the Drama School 's basketball courts every day. Next to the courts was the canteen. My eyes used to steal toward it as soon as we formed up, even if I had just finished breakfast.

I was obsessed with food, although I was not sure whether this was due to the lack of meat, or the cold, or the boredom of the drilling. I dreamed of the variety of Sichuan cuisine, of crispy duckling, sweet-and-sour fish, "Drunken Chicken," and dozens of other succulent delicacies.

None of us six girls was used to having money. We also thought that buying things was somehow 'capitalist." So, in spite of my obsession with food, I only bought one bunch of toffee-coated water chestnuts, after my appetite for them had been whetted by the ones our officers gave us. I resolved to give myself this treat after a great deal of agonizing and consultation with the other girls. When I got home after the trip I immediately devoured some stale biscuits, while handing my grandmother the almost untouched money she had given me. She pulled me into her arms and kept saying, "What a silly girl!"

I also returned home with rheumatism. Peking was so cold that water froze in the taps. Yet I was drilling, in the open, without an overcoat. There was no hot water to warm up our icy feet. When we first arrived, we were given a blanket each. Some days later, more girls arrived, but there were no more blankets. We decided to give them three and share the other three between us six. Our upbringing had taught us to help comrades in need. We had been informed that our blankets had come from stores reserved for wartime. Chairman Mao had ordered them to be taken out for the comfort of his Red Guards. We expressed our heartfelt gratitude to Mao. Now, when we ended up with hardly any blankets, we were told to be even more grateful to Mao, because he had given us all China had.

The blankets were small, and could not cover two people unless they slept close together. The shapeless nightmares which had started after I had seen the attempted suicide had become worse after my father was taken away and my mother left for Peking; and since I slept badly, I often twisted out from under the blanket. The room was poorly heated, and once I fell asleep, an icy chill invaded me. By the time we left Peking the joints in my knees were so inflamed that I could hardly bend them.

My discomfort did not stop there. Some children from the countryside had fleas and lice. One day I came into our room and saw one of my friends crying. She had just discovered a blot of tiny white eggs in the armpit seam of her underwear lice eggs. This threw me into a panic, because lice caused unbearable itchiness and were associated with dirtiness. From then on, I felt itchy all the time, and examined my underwear several times a day. How I longed for Chairman Mao to see us soon so I could go home!

On the afternoon of 24 November, I was in one of our usual Mao quotation studying sessions in one of the boys' rooms (officers and boys would not come into the girls' rooms, out of modesty). Our nice company commander came in with an unusually light gait and proposed conducting us in the most famous song of the Cultural Revolution: "When Sailing the Seas, We Need the Helmsman."

He had never done this before, and we were all pleasantly surprised. He waved his arms beating time, his eyes shining, his cheeks flushed. When he finished, and announced with restrained excitement that he had some good news, we knew immediately what it was.

"We're going to see Chairman Mao tomorrow!" he exclaimed. The rest of his words were drowned out by our cheers. After the initial wordless yelling, our excitement took the form of shouting slogans: "Long live Chairman Mao!"

"We will follow Chairman Mao forever!"

The company commander told us that no one could leave the campus from that minute on, and that we should watch one another to make sure of this. To be asked to watch one another was quite normal. Besides, these were safety measures for Chairman Mao, which we were only too glad to apply. After dinner, the officer approached my five companions and me, and said in a hushed and solemn voice: "Would you like to do something to ensure Chairman Mao's safety?"

"Of course!" He signaled for us to keep quiet, and continued in a whisper: "Would you propose before we leave tomorrow morning that we all search each other to make sure that no one is carrying anything they shouldn't? You know, young people might forget about the rules… He had announced the rules earlier that we must not bring anything metal, not even keys, to the rally.

Most of us could not sleep, and excitedly talked the night away. At four o'clock in the morning we got up and gathered in disciplined ranks for the hour-and-a-half walk to Tiananmen Square. Before our 'company' set off, at a wink from the officer, Plumpie stood up and proposed a search. I could see that some of the others thought she was wasting our time, but our company commander cheerfully seconded her proposal. He suggested we search him first.

A boy was called to do this, and found a big bunch of keys on him. Our commander acted as though he had been genuinely careless, and gave Plumpie a victorious smile.

The rest of us searched each other. This roundabout way of doing things reflected a Maoist practice: things had to look as though they were the wish of the people, rather than commands from above. Hypocrisy and playacting were taken for granted.

The early-morning streets were bursting with activity.

Red Guards were marching toward Tiananmen Square from all over the capital. Deafening slogans surged like roaring waves. As we chanted, we raised our hands and our Little Red Books formed a dramatic red line against the darkness. We reached the square at dawn. I was placed in the seventh row from the front on the wide northern pavement of the Avenue of Eternal Peace to the east side of Tiananmen Square. Behind me were many more rows.

After lining us up tidily, our officers ordered us to sit down on the hard ground cross-legged. With my inflamed joints, this was agony, and I soon got pins and needles in my bottom. I was deadly cold and drowsy and exhausted because I could not fall asleep. The officers conducted nonstop singing, making different groups challenge each other, to keep up our spirits.

Shortly before noon, hysterical waves of "Long live Chairman Mao!" roared from the east. I had been flagging and was slow to realize that Mao was about to pass by in an open car. Suddenly thunderous yelling exploded all around me.

"Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao!" People sitting in front of me shot up and hopped in delirious excitement, their raised hands frantically waving their Litfie Red Books.

"Sit down! Sit down!"

I cried, in vain. Our company commander had said that we all had to remain seated throughout. But few seemed to be observing the rules, possessed by their urge to set eyes on Mao.

Having been sitting for so long, my legs had gone numb.

For some seconds, all I could see was a boiling sea of the backs of heads. When I finally managed to totter to my feet, I caught only the very end of the motorcade. Liu Shaoqi, the president, had his face turned in my direction.

Wall posters had already started attacking Liu as " China 's Khrushchev' and the leading opponent of Mao.

Although he had not been officially denounced, it was clear that his downfall was imminent. In press reports of the Red Guard rallies, he was always given a very undistinguished place. In this procession, instead of standing next to Mao, as the number-two man should have done, he was right at the back, in one of the last cars.

Liu looked subdued and weary. But I did not have any feelings for him. Although he was the president, he did not mean anything to my generation. We had grown up imbued with the cult of Mao alone. And if Liu was against Mao, it seemed to us natural that he should go.

At that moment, with the sea of youngsters screaming their loyalty to Mao, Liu must have felt how utterly hopeless his situation was. The irony was that he himself had been instrumental in promoting Mao's deification, which had led to this explosion of fanaticism in the youth of a nation which was largely unreligious. Liu and his colleagues may have helped deificao in order to appease him, thinking that he would be satisfied with abstract glory and leave them to get on with the mundane work, but Mao wanted absolute power both on earth and in heaven. And perhaps there was nothing they could have done: the cult of Mao may have been unstoppable.

These reflections did not occur to me on the morning of 25 November 1966. All I cared about then was catching a glimpse of Chairman Mao. I turned my eyes quickly away from Liu to the front of the motorcade. I spotted Mao's stalwart back, his right arm steadily waving. In an instant, he had disappeared. My heart sank. Was that all I would see of Chairman Mao? Only a fleeting glimpse of his back?

The sun seemed suddenly to have turned gray. All around me the Red Guards were making a huge din. The girl standing next to me had just pierced the index finger of her right hand and was squeezing blood out of it to write something on a neatly folded handkerchief. I knew exactly the words she was going to use. It had been done many times by other Red Guards and had been publicized ad name am "I am the happiest person in the world today. I have seen our Great Leader Chairman Mao!" Watching her, my despair grew. Life seemed pointless. A thought flickered into my mind: perhaps I should commit suicide?

It vanished almost the next instant. Looking back, I suppose the idea was really a subconscious attempt to quantify my devastation at having my dream smashed, especially after all the hardships I had suffered on my journey. The bursting trains, the inflamed knees, the hunger and cold, the itchiness, the blocked toilets, the exhaustion all in the end unrewarded.

Our pilgrimage was over and a few days later we headed home. I had had enough of the trip, and I longed for warmth and comfort, and a hot bath. But the thought of home was tinged with apprehension. No matter how uncomfortable, the journey had never been frightening, as my life immediately prior to it had been. Living in close contact with thousands and thousands of Red Guards for well over a month, I had never seen any violence, or felt terror. The gigantic crowds, hysterical though they were, were well disciplined and peaceful. The people I met were friendly.

Just before I left Peking, a letter came from my mother.

It said my father had fully recovered and everyone in Chengdu was fine. But she added at the end that both she and my father were being criticized as capitalist-roaders.

My heart sank. By now it had become clear to me that capitalist-roaders Communist officials were the main targets of the Cultural Revolution. I was soon to see what this meant for my family and for me.