Wild Ginger - Anchee Min [8]
"Chairman Mao teaches us"—the daughter interrupted the mother—"'It is impossible for one class member to love the member of his opposite class."'
"You were your father's everything!"
"I don't want to hear it."
"How can you have the heart to do this?"
"You are insulting me, Mother."
"For God's sake!"
"The hell with God the ghost-head!"
"You'll be punished for scorning the Lord."
"To be born of such parents is to be punished. I have been serving my sentence. I have been called a little spy in every school I attended, and I have been treated with distrust from both authorities and classmates. No matter how hard I've tried, no one has accepted me. Look!" She pulled up her sleeves and revealed bruises.
Suddenly I understood her habit of scratching. It was not a skin disease but the healing of her bruises that made her itch.
"Don't make me say words that will hurt you, Mother," Wild Ginger continued. "All I want in life is to be able to be accepted and trusted, to be a Maoist like everyone else in this country. This is not too much to ask, is it? Is it, Mother? But because of you and that Frenchman, I am doomed."
"Help me, God." Mrs. Pei buried her face in the pillow.
"Sure, help me, God, the devil is taking my child," Wild Ginger said hysterically. "Mother, don't force me to make a report on you. Outcast and rejected as I am, I will denounce you and move myself out of this stinky house!"
Mrs. Pei began to shiver under the sheets. After a few deep breaths she said, weeping, "Jean-Michel, take me, please. For I can bear no more..."
What the daughter expressed here didn't make sense to the mother, but it made perfect sense to me. To become a Maoist for our generation was like attaining the state of Nirvana for a Buddhist. We might not yet understand the literature of Maoism, but since kindergarten we were taught that the process, the conversion—to enslave our body and soul, to sacrifice what was requested in order to "get there"—was itself the meaning of our lives. The sacrifice meant learning not only to separate ourselves from, but to actually denounce, those we loved most when judgment called. We were also taught to manage the pain that came with such actions. It was called the "true tests." The notion was so powerful that youths throughout the nation became caught up in it. From 1965 to 1969 millions of young people stood out despite their pain and publicly denounced their family members, teachers, and mentors in order to show devotion toward Mao. They were honored.
I understood the importance of being a Maoist. I myself tried desperately to survive the "true tests." I must say that we were not blind in believing in Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Worshiping him as the savior of China was not crazy. The truth was that without him leading the Communist party and its armies, China would be a sliced melon, swallowed up long ago by foreign powers like Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia. The information I brought back from school was confirmed by my father, who was a teacher of Chinese history. The Opium War in 1840 was a good example of how close China came to being destroyed. The incompetent emperor of the Ching dynasty was forced to sign "hundred-year leases" opening coastal provinces and ports for "free trading." This took place after the foreign soldiers burned down Yuan-ming-yuan—the emperor's magnificent palace in Beijing—and the Allied commander pleased himself with a Chinese prostitute on the empress's bed.
The Japanese invasion in 1937 was another good example of thé government's incompetence. It demonstrated what the foreigners were really up to when they talked of "free trading." China was not allowed to say no to their greed. When she did, the "rape" took place. During the Japanese occupation, thirty million Chinese were killed. Just in Nanking alone, the Japanese slaughtered as many as 350,000 people and raped eighty thousand women.
The pictures of heaps of severed heads we were