Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [22]
After this speech, he ordered us back to our classes to study the Little Red Book for the rest of the afternoon. I, like all my classmates, was truly scared that if Lin Biao had succeeded, we would all live in the dark ages once more. This made me more determined to be a good young guard of Chairman Mao’s. At dinner that night, we talked excitedly about Lin Biao’s demise. But our parents’ reactions were different.
“Who cares about Lin Biao!” our niang said. “All I’m concerned about is food on the table.”
“Your niang is right,” our dia chipped in. “Who has time to worry about the government? What we need is enough food to survive.”
During my second year at school, we learned how to write “We love Chairman Mao” and “Kill, crush Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the class enemies.” I wondered how useful all this talk about Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese president, and his right-hand man, Deng Xiaoping, was meant to be. Sometimes we’d write these things in chalk on the walls of people’s houses. Over time, with people scribbling over each other’s writing, all the words became muddled. Some of the older boys often wrote rude remarks about people they didn’t like, and common family names such as Zhang, Li, Wang, and Zhou often got mixed up in the scribbling.
One day, an education official from the Qingdao government passed through our village and noticed some of the writing: “Kill, crush, Mao, Zhou, and Lai,” it read. The official charged into the village office and demanded a thorough investigation. Many people were questioned by the police.
The next day, in the middle of our math class, our headmaster and two policemen came in and asked all the students who lived in the New Village to stand up. We didn’t know what was happening. The headmaster told us to follow him to his office, where we were divided into two groups. The police questioned us for a whole morning about the writing on our village wall. I’d thought it was going to be about something much more important! Did you write on the wall? Did you see anyone else write on that wall? Have you seen any strangers in your village lately? Do you know anyone who may dislike Chairman Mao or Premier Zhou? I was puzzled. I couldn’t imagine anyone not loving our great leaders.
The officials eventually let the matter go. But the police appeared in our village quite frequently after that, and none of us dared write anything on the walls ever again.
It wasn’t long after this, on the way home from school, that I found something that was to become my secret treasure. A book. Only about forty pages, lying on the street near the garbage dump. I picked it up and started to read the first page and couldn’t stop. It was a foreign story translated into Chinese. I couldn’t understand all the words but I could make out that the story was about a rich steel baron, in some place called Chicago, who fell in love with a young girl. I’d just got to the bit where he used his money to build a new theater when the pages ran out. How I wished I had the rest of the book! It was such delicious reading! Love stories were hard to find. The Red Guards destroyed any books that contained even a hint of romance or Western flavor. You would be jailed if such books were found in your house.
I locked those forty pages in my personal drawer, never realizing the danger I’d put my family in. I read them many times. I wondered how the people in the story could have such freedom. It sounded too good to be true. Even after hearing years of fearful propaganda about America and the West, the book was enough to plant a seed of curiosity in my heart.
To satisfy our need for stories, some friends and I turned to the opera and ballet storybooks that our