In the Countryside 下乡的日子

By October, 1969, my work place was among hundreds of schools and institutions in the provincial city of Fuzhou to be disbanded.  Those who were still under investigation for their past or present counter-revolutionary affiliations or activities were not allowed to leave; those who were members of the Cultural Revolutionary Committee, or were related to those in power, were allowed to stay.  The rest were all asked to go to the countryside.  We were to keep our salary and our city residential status, but were to be stationed in the countryside for an indefinite period of time. We became members of Fujian Province's first "Propaganda Team of Mao Tse-tung's Thought".

This event closely followed the national campaign to send "young intellectuals" to the countryside.  After three years of fierce and chaotic Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, children of middle and high schools in the cities were now forced to go to the countryside in large numbers.  They were to live and labor with the peasants.  Their first year's food and housing were to be provided for by the state, but were to survive on their own from the second year on. They were referred to as "young intellectuals" and were "to be re-educated by poor and middle peasants", as Chairman Mao said in his directive.  My younger brother, Yanbei, who was in his junior year when "Cultural Revolution" broke out, was among those "young intellectuals", and happened to be sent to the same commune and brigade that I was assigned to go to: He Xi Commune (see white arrow mark on the map above), Qian Yang Brigade. 

The very day I arrived, my brother Yanbei and cousin Zhongliang came to live with me in one of the houses on a small hill.  The owners of that house were stationed year long on a remote farm deep in the mountains, so we had the house all to our own.  Life was primitive but not too bad.  I still had my salary, and did not have to toil the soil as my brother, cousin and other "young intellectuals" did.   As members of the "Propaganda Team of Mao Tse-tung's Thought", we did not have real powers, but participated in the leadership of numerous conferences and campaigns to try to "get both revolution and production going".  At 28, I was still young, and had the idealism and passion of someone who sees good and evil only at their face values.   Since college, I had worked from school to school.  In all the previous years of the Cultural Revolution, I was not involved in any of the fights or political power struggles inside or outside of my job place. So here I was to meet my first big setback. 

As was the fashion of the time, the brigade "Revolutionary Committee" consisted of old Party establishment and young beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution.  One of the young beneficiaries, Yan Tong, was in charge of the brigade seal.  That seal, and approval, was needed when a "young intellectual" wanted to leave the brigade to go back to the city to visit his or her family.   To get the stamp of the seal as approval, young intellectuals often had to give him food or cigarettes, or work on his personal vegetable plot for a few hours. 

At the next "Cultural Revolutionary Committee" meeting, I learned that Yan Tong was away to his native home for a visit, but had left the official seal to the keeping of his brother Yan Bian, who was not a member of the Committee. At my suggestion, committee members went to Yan Bian's home to retrieve the official seal.  In the history of China, an official seal has always been the very embodiment--not just a symbol--of power and prestige.  During the Cultural Revolution, most of the fighting among Red Guards of rival factions broke out and ended with the seizure, or transfer, of official seals. I was thus involved in the power struggle of this brigade, whose rival factions had their associates in the commune, county, and above, and who either liked me or hated me for speaking out. 

Soon afterwards, I got various harsh assignments.  I was sent to a remote mountain village all by myself for several months.  36 years have gone by and I have begun to miss that small, remote village with a beautiful name: Moony and Starry.  While my former brigade was only ten minutes of walk away from administrative center of the Commune, where the marketing place was, Moony and Starry was one hour of walk on an unpaved highway, then another hour of walk up the mountain.  There were no bus service of any kind, and I did not have a bicycle.  The walk was always long and lonely, but I endured it magnificently by reciting English poems that I brought with me on small straps of paper.  When a poem consists of several stanzas, I would pick up the initial of the first line of each stanza to cone a phrase for myself to remember.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hymn to the Night, for instance, would become 3IFOP to me.  See the colored first letters below:

HYMN TO THE NIGHT

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
Stoop o'er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
As of the one I love.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
The manifold, soft chimes,
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night
Like some old poet's rhymes.

From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,--
From those deep cisterns flows.

O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear
What man has borne before!
Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,
And they complain no more.

Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer!
Descend with broad-winged flight,
The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!

By the time I became a graduate student eight years later in 1978, I had learned and memorized more English poems and essays than the two-year graduate studies of English and American Literatures would have covered.  Looking back at those lonesome years at Moony and Starry, I missed the mountain paths where bamboo shoots would prop up every morning and would pierce my bare feet.  I missed the stream where I fetched water for cooking and did my laundry, but where the water would become yellow and muddy as soon as there was a downpour up stream.  Life there was really boring and isolated.  There was no electricity, no telephone, and no mail service.  But I learned to bear the hardships and loneliness the best I could, and I learned what I could not have learned if I were still teaching in a school.  I not only witnessed, but lived the life of the lowly and impoverished.  I understood a little better of how complicated and unfair the society was, and I saw more clearly of my own ignorance and weaknesses. 

December 2006