Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

26. "Sniffing after Foreigners' Farts and Calling Them Sweet"

Since her return from Peking in autumn 1972, helping her five children had been my mother's major occupation.

My youngest brother, Xiao-fang, then aged ten, needed daily coaching to make up for his missed school years, and the future of her other children depended largely on her.

With the society half paralyzed for over six years, an enormous number of social problems had been created, and simply left unsolved. One of the most serious was the many millions of young people who had been sent to the countryside and who were desperate to come back to the cities. After the demise of Lin Biao it began to be possible for some to get back, partly because the state needed labor for the urban economy, which it was now trying to revitalize. But the government also had to put strict limits on the number who could return because it was state policy in China to control the population of the cities: the state took it on itself to guarantee the urban population food, housing, and jobs.

So competition for the limited 'return tickets' was fierce.

The state created regulations to keep the number down.

Marriage was one criterion for exclusion. Once married, no organization in the city would take you. It was on these grounds that my sister was disqualified from applying for a job in the city, or to a university, which were the only legitimate ways to get back to Chengdu. She was extremely miserable, as she wanted to join her husband; his factory had started working normally again, and as a result he could not go to Deyang and live with her, except for the official 'marriage leave' of just twelve days a year. Her only chance of getting to Chengdu was to obtain a certificate that said she had an incurable disease which was what many like her were doing. So my mother had to help her get one from a doctor Mend which said Xiao-hong suffered from cirrhosis of the liver. She came back to Chengdu at the end of 1972.

The way to get things done now was through personal connections. There were people coming to see my mother every day schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, actors, and minor officials appealing for help to get their children out of the countryside. Often she was their only hope, although she had no job, and she pulled strings on their behalf with unflagging energy. My father would not help; he was too set in his ways to start 'fixing."

Even when the official channel worked, the personal connection was still essential to make sure things went smoothly and to avoid potential disaster. My brother Jin-ming got out of his village in March 1972. Two organizations were recruiting new workers from his commune: one was a factory in his county town making electrical appliances, the other an unspecified enterprise in the Western District of Chengdu. Jin-ming wanted to get back to Chengdu, but my mother made inquiries among her friends in the Western District and found out that the job was in a slaughterhouse.

Jin-ming immediately withdrew his application and went to work in the local factory instead.

It was in fact a large plant which had relocated from Shanghai in 1966 as part of Mao's plan to conceal industry in the mountains of Sichuan against an American or Soviet attack. Jin-ming impressed his fellow workers with his hard work and fairness, and in 1973 he was one of four young people elected by the factory to attend a university, out of 200 applicants. He passed his exam papers brilliantly and effortlessly. But because Father had not been rehabilitated, my mother had to make sure that when the university came to do the obligatory 'political investigation' they would not be scared off, and would instead get the impression that he was about to be cleared. She also had to ensure that Jin-ming was not pushed out by some failed applicant with powerful connections. In October 1973, when I went to Sichuan University, Jin-ming was admitted to the Engineering College of Central China at Wuhan to study casting.

He would have preferred to do physics, but he was in seventh heaven anyway.

While Jin-ming and I had been preparing to try to get into a university, my second brother, Xiao-her, was living in a state of despondency. The basic qualification for university entrance was that one had to have been either a worker, a peasant, or a soldier, and he had been none of these. The government was still expelling urban youth en masse to the rural areas, and this was the only future facing him except joining the armed forces. Dozens applied for every place, and the only way in was via connections.

My mother got Xiao-her in in December 1972, against almost impossible odds, as my father had not been cleared.

Xiao-her was assigned to an air force college in northern China, and after three months' basic training became a radio operator. He worked five hours a day, in a supremely leisurely manner, and spent the rest of the time in 'political studies' and producing food.

In the 'studies' sessions everyone claimed they had joined the armed forces 'to follow the Party's command, to protect the people, to safeguard the motherland." But there were more pertinent reasons. The young men from the cities wanted to avoid being sent to the countryside, and those from the country hoped to use the army as a springboard to leap into the city. For peasants from poor areas, being in the armed forces meant at least a better filled stomach.

As the 1970s unfolded, joining the Party, like joining the army, became increasingly unrelated to ideological commitment. Everyone said in their applications that the Party was 'great, glorious, and correct," and that 'to join the Party means to devote my life to the most splendid cause of mankind the liberation of the world proletariat."

But for most the real reason was personal advantage. This was the obligatory step to becoming an officer; and when an officer was discharged he automatically became a 'state official," with a secure salary, prestige, and power, not to mention a city registration. A private had to go back to his village and become a peasant again. Every year before discharge time there would be stories of suicides, breakdowns, and depressions.

One evening Xiao-her was sitting with about a thousand soldiers and officers, and the officers' families, watching an open-air movie.

Suddenly submachine-gun fire crackled out, followed by a huge explosion. The audience scattered, screaming.

The shots came from a guard who was about to be discharged and sent back to his village, having failed to get into the Party and thus to be promoted to officer grade.

First he shot dead the commissar of his company, whom he held responsible for blocking his promotion, and then he fired at random into the crowd, tossing a hand grenade.

Five more people were killed, all women and children from officers' families. Over a dozen were wounded. He then fled into a residential block, where he was besieged by fellow soldiers, who shouted at him through megaphones to surrender. But the moment the guard fired out of the window, they broke and ran, to the amusement of the hundreds of excited onlookers. Finally, a special unit arrived. After a fierce exchange of fire, they broke into the apartment and found the guard had committed suicide.

Like everyone else around him, Xiao-her wanted to get into the Party. It was not such a matter of life and death for him as for the peasant soldiers, since he knew he would not have to go to the countryside after his military career.

The rule was that you went back to where you came from, so he would automatically be given a job in Chengdu whether he was a Party member or not. But the job would be better if he was a Party member. He would also have more access to information, which was important to him, since China at the time was an intellectual desert, with almost nothing to read apart from the crudest propaganda.

Besides these practical considerations, par was never absent. For many people, joining the Party was rather like taking out an insurance policy. Party membership meant you were less distrusted, and this sense of relative security was very comforting. What was more, in an extremely political environment like the one Xiao-her was in, if he did not want to join the Party it would be noted in his personal file and suspicion would follow him: "Why does he not want to join the Party?" To apply and not be accepted was also likely to give rise to suspicion: "Why was he not accepted? There must be something wrong with him."

Xiao-her had been reading Marxist classics with genuine interest they were the only books available, and he needed something to satisfy his intellectual thirst. Because the Communist Party charter stated that studying Marxism-Leninism was the first qualification for being a Party member, he thought he could combine his interest with practical gain. But neither his bosses nor his comrades were impressed. In fact, they felt shown up because, coming mostly from peasant backgrounds and being semiliterate, they could not understand Marx. Xiao-her was criticized for being arrogant and cutting himself off from the masses. If he wanted to join the Party, he would have to find another way.

The most important thing, he soon realized, was to please his immediate bosses. The next was to please his comrades. In addition to being popular and working hard at his job, he had to 'serve the people' in the most literal sense.

Unlike most armies, which assign unpleasant and menial tasks to the lower ranks, the Chinese army operated by waiting for people to volunteer for jobs like fetching water for morning ablutions and sweeping the grounds. Reveille was at 6:30 a.m.; the 'honored task' of getting up before this fell to those who aspired to join the Party. And there were so many of them they fought each other for the brooms. In order to secure a broom, people got up earlier and earlier. One morning Xiao-her heard someone sweeping the grounds just after 4 a.m.

There were other important chores, and the one which counted most was helping to produce food. The basic food allowance was very small, even for officers. There was meat only once a week. So every company had to grow its own grain and vegetables and raise its own pigs. At harvest time the company commissar would often deliver pep talks: "Comrades, now is the time of testing by the Party! We must finish the whole field by this evening! Yes, the work needs ten times the manpower we have. But every one of us revolutionary fighters can do the job of ten men!

Communist Party members must take a leading role. For those who want to join the Party, this is the best time to prove yourselves! Those who have passed the test will be able to join the Party on the battlefield at the end of the day!"

Party members did have to work hard to fulfill their 'leading role," but it was the aspiring applicants who really had to exert themselves. On one occasion, Xiao-her became so exhausted that he collapsed in the middle of a field. While the new members who had earned 'battlefield enrollment' raised their right fists and gave the standard pledge 'to fight all my life for the glorious Communist cause," Xiao-her was taken to a hospital, where he had to stay for days.

The most direct path to Party was raising pigs. The company had several dozen of these and they occupied an unequaled place in the hearts of the soldiers; officers and men alike would hang around the pigsty, observing, commenting, and willing the animals to grow. If the pigs were doing well, the swine herds were the darlings of the company, and there were many contestants for this profession.

Xiao-her became a full-time swineherd. It was hard, filthy work, not to mention the psychological pressure.

Every night he and his colleagues took turns to get up in the small hours to give the pigs an extra feed. When a sow produced piglets they kept watch night after night in case she crushed them. Precious soybeans were carefully picked, washed, ground, strained, made into 'soybean milk," and lovingly fed to the mother to stimulate her milk.

Life in the air force was very unlike what Xiao-her had imagined. Producing food took up more than a third of the entire time he was in the military. At the end of a year's arduous pig raising, Xiao-her was accepted into the Party.

Like many others, he put his feet up and began to take it easy.

After membership in the Party, everyone's ambition was to become an officer; whatever advantage the former brought, the latter doubled it. Getting to be an officer depended on being picked by one's superiors, so the key was never to displease them. One day Xiao-her was summoned to see one of the college's political commissars.

Xiao-her was on tenterhooks, not knowing whether he was in for some unexpected good fortune or total disaster. The commissar, a plump man in his fifties with puffy eyes and a loud, commanding voice, looked exceedingly benign as he lit up a cigarette and asked Xiao-her about his family background, age, and state of health. He also asked whether he had a fiance to which Xiao-her replied that he did not. It struck Xiao-her as a good sign that the man was being so personal. The commissar went on to praise him: "You have studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought conscientiously. You have worked hard. The masses have a good impression of you. Of course, you must keep on being modest; modesty makes you progress," and so on. By the time the commissar stubbed out his cigarette, Xiao-her thought his promotion was in his pocket.

The commissar lit a second cigarette and began to tell a story about a fire in a cotton mill, and about a woman spinner who had been severely burned dashing back in to rescue 'state property." In fact, all her limbs had had to be amputated, so that there was only a head and a torso left, although, the commissar stressed, her face had not been destroyed, or more important her ability to produce babies. She was, said the commissar, a heroine, and was going to be publicized on a grand scale in the press. The Party would like to grant all her wishes, and she had said that she wanted to marry an air force officer. Xiao-her was young, handsome, unattached, and could be made an officer at any time… Xiao-her sympathized with the lady, but marrying her was another matter. But how could he refuse the commissar? He could not produce any convincing reasons. Love? Love was supposed to be bound up with 'class feelings," and who could deserve more class feelings than a Communist heroine? Saying he did not know her would not get him off the hook either. Many marriages in China had been the result of an arrangement by the Party. As a Party member, particularly one hoping to become an officer, Xiao-her was supposed to say: "I resolutely obey the Party's decision!" He bitterly regretted having said he had no fiance. His mind was racing to think of a way to say no tactfully as the commissar went on about the advantages: immediate promotion to officer, publicity as a hero, a fulltime nurse, and a large allowance for life.

The commissar lit yet another cigarette, and paused.

Xiao-her weighed his words. Taking a calculated risk, he asked if this was already an irreversible Party decision. He knew the Party always preferred people to 'volunteer." As he expected, the commissar said no: it was up to Xiao-her.

Xiao-her decided to bluff his way through: he "confessed" that although he did not have a fiance, his mother had arranged a girlfriend for him. He knew this girlfriend had to be good enough to knock out the heroine, and this meant possessing two attributes: the right class background and good works in that order. So she became the daughter of the commander of a big army region, and worked in an army hospital. They had just begun 'talking about love."

The commissar backed off, saying he had only wanted to see how Xiao-her felt, and had no intention of forcing a match on him. Xiao-her was not punished, and not long afterward he became an officer and was put in charge of a ground radio communications unit. A young man from a peasant background came forward to marry the disabled heroine.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.

Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.

He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.

Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

It was in this period that I started to realize that it was Mao who was really responsible for the Cultural Revolution. But I still did not condemn him explicitly, even in my own mind. It was so difficult to destroy a god! But, psychologically, I was ripe for his name to be spelled out for me.

Education became the front line of the sabotage by Mme Mao and her cabal, because it was not immediately vital to the economy and because every attempt at learning and teaching involved a reversal of the glorified ignorance of the Cultural Revolution. When I entered the university, I found myself in a battlefield.

Sichuan University had been the headquarters of 26 August, the Rebel group that had been the task force of the Tings, and the buildings were pockmarked with scars from the seven years of the Cultural Revolution. Scarcely a window was intact. The pond in the middle of the campus, once renowned for its elegant lotuses and goldfish, was now a stinking, mosquito-breeding swamp. The French plane trees which lined the avenue leading from the main gate had been mutilated.

The moment I entered the university a political campaign started up against 'going through the back door." Of course, there was no mention of the fact that it was the Cultural Revolution leaders themselves who had blocked the 'front door." I could see that there were a lot of high officials' children among the new 'worker-peasant-soldier' students, and that virtually all the rest had connections the peasants with their production team leaders or commune secretaries, the workers with their factory bosses, if they were not petty officials themselves. The 'back door' was the only way in. My fellow students demonstrated lit He vigor in this campaign.

Every afternoon, and some evenings, we had to 'study' turgid People's Daily articles denouncing one thing or another, and hold nonsensical 'discussions' at which everyone repeated the newspaper's overblown, vapid language.

We had to stay on the campus all the time, except Saturday evening and Sunday, and had to return by Sunday evening.

I shared a bedroom with five other girls. There were two tiers of three bunk beds on opposite walls. In between was a table and six chairs where we did our work. There was scarcely room for our washbasins. The window opened onto a stinking open sewer.

English was my subject, but there was almost no way to learn it. There were no native English speakers around, indeed no foreigners at all. The whole of Sichuan was closed to foreigners. Occasionally the odd one was let in, always a 'friend of China," but even to speak to them without authorization was a criminal offense. We could be put into prison for listening to the BBC or the Voice of America.

No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain, and even this was locked up in a special room. I remember the thrill of being given permission once, just once, to look at a copy. My excitement wilted when my eyes fell on the front-page article echoing the campaign to criticize Confucius. As I was sitting there nonplussed, a lecturer whom I liked walked past and said with a smile, "That paper is probably read only in China."

Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.

Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').

I had the misfortune to be better at English than my classmates, and was therefore resented by some of the 'student officials," the lowest-level controllers, who supervised political indoctrination sessions and checked the 'thought conditions' of their fellow students. The student officials in my course had mostly come from the countryside. They were keen to learn English, but most of them were semi-literate, and had lit He aptitude. I sympathized with their anxiety and frustration, and understood their jealousy of me. But Mao's concept of 'white and expert' made them feel virtuous about their inadequacies, and gave their envy political respectability, and them a malicious opportunity to vent their exasperation.

Every now and then a student official would require a 'heart-to-heart' with me. The leader of the Party cell in my course was a former peasant named Ming who had joined the army and then become a production team leader. He was a very poor student, and would give me long, righteous lectures about the latest developments in the Cultural Revolution, the 'glorious tasks of us worker peasant-soldier students," and the need for 'thought reform." I needed these heart-to-hearts because of my 'shortcomings," but Ming would never come straight to the point. He would let a criticism hang in midair "The masses have a complaint about you. Do you know what it is?" and watch the effect on me. He would eventually disclose some allegation. One day it was the inevitable charge that I was 'white and expert." Another day I was 'bourgeois' because I failed to fight for the chance to clean the toilet, or to wash my comrades' clothes all obligatory good deeds. And yet another time he would attribute a despicable motive: that I did not spend most of my time tutoring my classmates because I did not want them to catch up with me.

One criticism that Ming would put to me with trembling lips (he obviously felt strongly about it) was "The masses have reported that you are aloof. You cut yourself off from the masses." It was common in China for people to assert that you were looking down on them if you failed to hide your desire for some solitude.

One level up from the student officials were the political supervisors, who also knew little or no English. They did not like me. Nor I them. From time to time I had to report my thoughts to the one in charge of my year, and before every session I would wander around the campus for hours summoning up the courage to knock on his door. Although he was not, I believed, an evil person, I feared him. But most of all I dreaded the inevitable tedious, ambiguous diatribe. Like many others, he loved playing cat and mouse to indulge his feeling of power. I had to look humble and earnest, and promise things I did not mean and had no intention of doing.

I began to feel nostalgia for my years in the countryside and the factory, when I had been left relatively alone. Universities were much more tightly controlled, being of particular interest to Mme Mao. Now I was among people who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. Without it, many of them would never have been here.

Once some students in my year were given the project of compiling a dictionary of English abbreviations. The department had decided that the existing one was 'reactionary' because, not surprisingly, it had far more 'capitalist' abbreviations than ones with an approved origin.

"Why should Roosevelt have an abbreviation FDR and not Chairman Mao?" some students asked indignantly. With tremendous solemnity they searched for acceptable entries, but eventually had to give up their 'historic mission' as there simply were not enough of the right kinds.

I found this environment unbearable. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.

We often had to leave the university to do things that were irrelevant to our subjects. Mao had said that we should 'learn things in factories, the countryside, and army units." What exactly we were meant to learn was, typically, unspecified. We started with 'learning in the countryside."

One week into the first term of my first year, in October 1973, the whole university was packed off to a place on the outskirts of Chengdu called Mount Dragon Spring, which had been the victim of a visit by one of China's vice-premiers, Chen Yonggui. He was previously the leader of a farming brigade called Dazhai in the mountainous northern province of Shanxi, which had become Mao's model in agriculture, ostensibly because it relied more on the peasants' revolutionary zeal than on material incentives.

Mao did not notice, or did not care, that Dazhai's claims were largely fraudulent. When Vice-Premier Chen visited Mount Dragon Spring he had remarked, "All, you have mountains here! Imagine how many fields you could create!" as if the fertile hills covered in orchards were like the barren mountains of his native village. But his remarks had the force of law. The crowds of university students dynamited the orchards that had provided Chengdu with apples, plums, peaches, and flowers. We transported stones from afar with pull carts and shoulder poles, for the construction of terraced rice paddies.

It was compulsory to demonstrate zeal in this, as in all actions called for by Mao. Many of my fellow students worked in a manner that screamed out for notice. I was regarded as lacking in enthusiasm, par fly because I had difficulty hiding my aversion to this activity, and partly because I did not sweat easily, no matter how much energy I expended. Those students whose sweat poured out in streams were invariably praised at the summing-up sessions every evening.

My university colleagues were certainly more eager than proficient. The sticks of dynamite they shoved into the ground usually failed to go off, which was just as well, as there were no safety precautions. The stone walls we built around the terraced edges soon collapsed, and by the time we left, after two weeks, the mountain slope was a wasteland of blast holes, cement solidified into shapeless masses, and piles of stones. Few seemed concerned about this.

The whole episode was ultimately a show, a piece of theater – a pointless means to a pointless end.

I loathed these expeditions and hated the fact that our labor, and our whole existence, was being used for a shoddy political game. To my intense irritation, I was sent off to an army unit, again with the whole university, in late 1974.

The camp, a couple of hours' truck journey from Chengdu, was in a beautiful spot, surrounded by rice paddies, peach blossoms, and bamboo groves. But our seventeen days there felt like a year. I was perpetually breathless from the long runs every morning, bruised from falling and crawling under the imaginary gunfire of 'enemy' tanks, and exhausted from hours of aiming a rifle at a target or throwing wooden hand grenades. I was expected to demonstrate my passion for, and my excellence at, all these activities, at which I was hopeless. It was unforgivable for me to be good only at English, my subject. These army tasks were political assignments, and I had to prove myself in them.

Ironically, in the army itself, good marksmanship and other military skills would lead to a soldier being condemned as 'white and expert."

I was one of the handful of students who threw the wooden hand grenades such a dangerously short distance that we were banned from the grand occasion of throwing the real thing. As our pathetic group sat on the top of a hill listening to the distant explosions, one girl burst into sobs. I felt deeply apprehensive too, at the thought of having given apparent proof of being 'white."

Our second test was shooting. As we marched onto the firing range, I thought to myself: I cannot afford to fail this, I absolutely have to pass. When my name was called and I lay on the ground, gazing at the target through the gunsight, I saw complete blackness. No target, no ground, nothing. I was trembling so much my whole body felt powerless. The order to fire sounded faint, as though it was floating from a great distance through clouds. I pulled the trigger, but I did not hear any noise, or see anything.

When the results were checked, the instructors were puzzled: none of my ten bullets had even hit the board, let alone the target.

I could not believe it. My eyesight was perfect. I told the instructor the gun barrel must be bent. He seemed to believe me: the result was too spectacularly bad to be entirely my fault. I was given another gun, provoking complaints from others who had asked, unsuccessfully, for a second chance. My second go was slightly better: two of the ten bullets hit the outer rings. Even so, my name was still at the bottom of the whole university. Seeing the results stuck on the wall like a propaganda poster, I knew that my 'whiteness' was further bleached. I heard snide remarks from one student official: "Humph! Getting a second chance! As if that would do her any good! If she has no class feelings, or class hatred, a hundred goes won't save her!"

In my misery, I retreated into my own thoughts, and hardly noticed the soldiers, young peasants in their early twenties, who instructed us. Only one incident drew my attention to them. One evening when some girls collected their clothes from the line on which they had hung them to dry, their knickers were unmistakably stained with semen.

In the university I found refuge in the homes of the professors and lecturers who had obtained their jobs before the Cultural Revolution, on academic merit. Several of the professors had been to Britain or the United States before the Communists took power, and I felt I could relax and speak the same language with them. Even so, they were cautious. Most intellectuals were, as the result of years of repression. We avoided dangerous topics. Those who had been to the West rarely talked about their time there.

Although I was dying to ask, I checked myself, not wanting to place them in a difficult position.

Partly for the same reason, I never discussed my thoughts with my parents. How could they have responded with dangerous truths or safe lies? Besides, I did not want them to worry about my heretical ideas. I wanted them to be genuinely in the dark, so that if anything happened to me they could truthfully say they did not know.

The people to whom I did communicate my thoughts were friends of my own generation. Actually, there was little else to do except talk, particularly with men friends.

To 'go out' with a man being seen alone together in public was tantamount to an engagement. There was still virtually no entertainment to go to anyway. Cinemas showed only the handful of works approved by Mine Mao.

Occasionally a rare foreign movie, perhaps from Albania, would be screened, but most of the tickets disappeared into the pockets of people with connections. A ferocious crowd would swamp the box office and try to tear each other away from the window to get the remaining few tickets. Scalpers made a killing.

So, we just sat at home and talked. We sat very properly, as in Victorian England. For women to have friendships with men was unusual in those days, and a girlfriend once said to me, "I've never known a girl who has so many men friends. Girls normally have girlfriends." She was right. I knew many girls who married the first man who came near them. From my own men friends, the only demonstrations of interest I got were some rather sentimental poems and restrained letters one of which, admittedly, was written in blood from the goalkeeper on the college football team.

My friends and I often talked about the West. By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place.

Paradoxically, the first people to put this idea into my head were Mao and his regime. For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of 'class hatred," respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence… As I sometimes wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West.}

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.

I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.

I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?

Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.

The librarians were delighted that these books were being read, especially by a student, and were extremely helpful. The index system had been thrown into chaos, and they dug through piles of books to find the ones I wanted. It was through the efforts of these kind young men and women that I laid my hands on some English classics.

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was the first novel I read in English. I found women writers like her, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters much easier to read than male authors like Dickens, and I also felt more empathy with their characters. I read a brief history of European and American literature, and was enormously impressed by the Greek tradition of democracy, Renaissance humanism, and the Enlightenment's questioning of everything. When I read in Gulliver's Travels about the emperor who 'published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs," I wondered if Swift had been to China. My joy at the sensation of my mind opening up and expanding was beyond description.

Being alone in the library was heaven for me. My heart would leap as I approached it, usually at dusk, anticipating the pleasure of solitude with my books, the outside world ceasing to exist. As I hurried up the flight of stairs, into the pastiche classical-style building, the smell of old books long stored in airless rooms would give me tremors of excitement, and I would hate the stairs for being too long.

With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Wait Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and those about men's 'unalienable Rights," among them "Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These concepts were unheard of in China, and opened up a marvelous new world for me. My notebooks, which I kept with me at all times, were full of passages like these, passionately and tearfully copied out.

One autumn day in 1974, with an air of extreme secrecy, a friend of mine showed me a copy of Newsweek with pictures of Mao and Mme Mao in it. She could not read English, and was keen to know what the article said. This was the first genuine foreign magazine I had ever set eyes on. One sentence in the article struck me like a flash of lightning. It said that Mme Mao was Mao's 'eyes, ears, and voice." Up fill that moment, I had never allowed myself to contemplate the obvious connection between Mme Mao's deeds and her husband. But now Mao's name was spelled out for me. My blurred perceptions surrounding his image came sharply into focus. It was Mao who had been behind the destruction and suffering. Without him, Mme Mao and her second-rate coterie could not have lasted a single day. I experienced the thrill of challenging Mao openly in my mind for the first time.