Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [21]
I found my fourth brother, Cunsang, as soon as we’d finished. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“It’s boring! I hate it!” I replied.
“Join the tribe. Why did you think I wanted you to make chaos when my teacher came to our house?” He was reminding me of the time we received the broomstick beating.
“How can you understand the writing? It all looks like grass to me,” I said.
He burst into laughter. “That’s what I thought the first few weeks. It will get better, I promise.”
I didn’t believe him. “What’s the use of learning words anyway?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly.
I followed him to my fifth brother’s classroom on the opposite side of the school yard and found Cunfar in the middle of a pile of bodies, wrestling each other onto the ground.
“How was your first lesson, scholar?” he teased breathlessly as he dusted off the dirt.
“All agony, no fun,” I replied.
“The math is even more fun!” Cunsang gave a wicked smile.
“Can’t be worse than Chinese,” I said.
“Just wait!” he replied as the bell rang for the next class.
I had prepared myself for the worst in our math class, but to my surprise the numbers were more bearable than the grasslike Chinese writing. Even so, I still preferred to dream of running wild outside and playing games with my friends.
I wasn’t the best student in my year, but my classmates did vote for me as one of the first Little Red Scarf Guards in our class. We wore a triangular red scarf around our necks, and for this honor we had to qualify in Mao’s “Three Goods”: good study, good work, and good health.
I didn’t learn much academic stuff during my time at school, except the many propaganda phrases and songs, and many of those I didn’t understand. I really only lived for the two weekly sports classes. I was good at the sporting stuff. We had rope-skipping and track-and-field, which was mainly running, and by the second half of our second year, Teacher Song had selected Yang Ping as the captain of our class and me as vice-captain.
During those school years of mine, the central government released Mao’s newest propaganda campaigns one after another. Often our school organized rallies when we would march around the villages playing drums, cymbals, and other instruments, carrying gigantic pictures of Chairman Mao and waving red flags. Everyone carried the Little Red Book, and we marched with pride. I felt so happy to be one of Mao’s Little Red Scarf Guards. Once I was chosen to lead the shouting of the political slogans. When we passed our village, I glanced around and saw my niang and my fourth aunt standing in the middle of the crowd. I shouted at the top of my voice: “Long, long live Chairman Mao!” Other leaders shouted at the same time. It was completely chaotic, but we all wanted our mothers to see and hear us.
“Niang, did you hear me?” I asked her when I came home that day.
“How could I hear you? It was like a zoo out there!” she replied.
In October 1971, some shocking news about Mao’s chosen successor came through our village’s loudspeakers. Vice-Chairman Lin Biao’s plane had been shot down over Mongolia. Lin Biao had been trying to flee to the Soviet Union when his evil motives were discovered. There was speculation that the plane he was on contained many top-secret documents. The most nerve-racking speculation was that there were factions of the military loyal to Lin Biao who could be attempting a coup to topple Mao’s government.
We were told how close Lin Biao was to Chairman Mao. He had written the foreword in the Little Red Book, which he was said to have always had in his hand.
When we returned to our school that afternoon, all scheduled classes were suspended. We were summoned to the school yard. With microphone in hand, the headmaster read out a document from the central government. Lin Biao had been planning