Susan Barker - The Incarnations

The Smash the Four Olds movement begins, and the Red Guards take over the streets of Beijing, intent on destroying the Old Culture, Old Society, Old Education and Old Ways of Thinking. Red Guards stand at intersections, shouting the quotations of Chairman Mao through loudspeakers. Red Guards hijack buses and lecture the passengers about the Ox Freaks and Snake Monsters in their midst. Red Guards armed with knives chase after people in western clothes, slashing their American-style shirts and dresses to shreds.

Destroy the Capitalists Street. All Hail the Red Guards Lane. The East is Red Boulevard. All over Beijing, street names are changed to revolutionary slogans. Shops selling paintings, ornaments and other ‘poisonous weeds of the capitalist classes’ are smashed up and portraits of Chairman Mao displayed in the windows. Signs saying Masses Beware! For Tens of Years This Shop Has Exploited the Sweat and Blood of the Workers! appear over shop doorways. The Red Guards ‘liberate’ the shop assistants from their managers, who are beaten to the floor. The Red Guards change the traffic-light system so revolutionary red means ‘go’ and green means ‘stop’. The Red Guards then persecute the victims of the resulting traffic accidents, for ‘clinging to the Old Culture and Old Ways of Thinking’.

Red Guards from Beijing University stand in our alley, halting passers-by and ordering them to quote Chairman Mao. They stop my mother, who nervously stammers, ‘Serve the People!’ (choosing the simplest quote, because those who misquote the Great Helmsman are beaten). The Red Guards stop Idiot Zhu from the junk yard, who, when asked for a quote, laughs and says, ‘Chairman Mao stinks of dog farts!’ The students take off their leather belts and beat the giggling Idiot Zhu, yelling, ‘Enemy of Chairman Mao! You deserve to die!’ They eventually drag Idiot Zhu off to jail, and we don’t see or hear of him again.

The home raids begin. Teenage fists bang bang bang on our courtyard gate, and my mother and I rush panicking around our room, hiding bamboo mah-jong tiles, father’s calligraphy and anything that could be labelled ‘poisonous weeds’. The Red Guards break the gate down and we are certain we are done for. But as we cower behind our locked door, we overhear them say, ‘What about the rightist Yi family?’

‘Zhang Liya struck them off the list. Besides, the Yi family don’t have a pot to piss in.’

And the twenty or so Red Guards storm into Granny Xi’s room instead.

Landscape paintings, Qing Dynasty vases, classic novels and land deeds to old properties in the city — the Red Guards drag a haul of riches out of Granny Xi’s room. Though Granny Xi petitioned to have my mother and me evicted, I can’t help but pity the old woman as she is dragged out and forced to kneel in the yard. Mother and I peek out the window as a pimply teenage boy slaps Granny Xi in the face with her Nationalist-era land deeds.

‘You kept these land deeds hoping that the Nationalists would return, didn’t you?’ he accuses. ‘You are hoping the Nationalists will come back and restore your status as a landlord, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ says Granny Xi, ‘I hate the Nationalists. I just forgot to throw them away.’

The Red Guard unbuckles his belt and tugs it out of the trouser loops. He lashes the strip of leather down on Granny Xi’s back and my mother gasps, ‘She’s eighty-four !’

They make a fire of Granny Xi’s poisonous weeds and force her to kneel close to her burning furniture and books so that the smoke makes her cough and the heat blisters her skin. When the Red Guards leave, carting Granny Xi’s valuables, or ‘Ill-gotten Gains of the Exploiting Classes’, off in a wheelbarrow, we go outside to help Granny Xi to her feet. Though she has long detested us, Granny Xi does not resist as my mother and I bring her into our room. The old woman collapses on a chair, her cheeks smudged with smoke, and her white hair and eyebrows singed. Mother kneels by Granny Xi and squeezes her wrinkled hand.

‘Do you love Chairman Mao with all your heart?’ she asks gently. ‘If you let that love shine out of your heart, Red Guards will leave you alone.’

And Granny Xi looks at my mother with such watery, defeated eyes I am nostalgic for the days they seethed at us with hate.

Every day the black-category students go to school. Every day we study Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book , write our Thought Reports and clean the school building. I am put on toilet-cleaning duty. Though I scrub the toilet bowls with my toothbrush every day for weeks, the pubic hairs, bloody sanitary napkins and faecal smears never cease to make me gag. But I can’t slack off, because Martial Spirit comes to inspect my work.

‘Why the vinegar-drinking face, Stinking Rightist? Too bourgeois to clean toilets, are you?’

Comrade Martial Spirit, formerly my mousy, twitchy classmate Socialist Flower, has become a monster since her promotion to jailer-in-command of the Cattle Shed. As I crouch by the toilet with a toothbrush in my hand, Martial Spirit sneers, ‘Scrub harder, Rightist! Or I’ll kick the capitalist airs and graces right out of you!’

My other duty is to feed the Black-gang Capitalists, incarcerated in the Cattle Shed. The Cattle Shed is the former music room, and the Black-gang Capitalists are our former teachers, now subject to interrogation for their crimes.

‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ I yell, entering the Cattle Shed with a tray of rice bowls.

‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ the teachers croak back, vocal cords ragged from screaming.

The Cattle Shed smells of unwashed bodies and fear-loosened bladders and bowels. ‘Long Live the Red Terror!’ has been finger-painted in blood on the wall, above the portrait of Chairman Mao. Weeks of intimidation have broken the teachers down. They cringe behind their desks with bruised eyes, obedient as whipped dogs. I serve the bowls of rice and their chopsticks tremble as they eat.

There are fewer Black-gang Capitalists now than at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Headteacher Yang was the first to die. The Cattle Shed jailers accidentally kicked her to death during an interrogation, and were out of their minds with panic afterwards. But there were no repercussions, and the next time they murdered a teacher they knew they had nothing to fear. Some Black-gang Capitalists commit suicide. I was the one who found Teacher Zhao’s corpse in the toilets, swinging from the leaky water pipes. Her salt-and-pepper head was bent over the noose and her toes swayed over the damp cement floor. A suicide note was pinned to her chalk-dusty Mao jacket:

I am an Enemy of the People.

In order not to poison the masses, I will exterminate myself from society.

Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

Long Live Chairman Mao!

I went to Headteacher Yang’s former office, now the headquarters of the Cattle Shed jailers, to break the news. Comrade Martial Spirit reacted with dismay.

‘Teacher Zhao is a traitor of the revolution,’ she spat. ‘Had I known she was going to commit suicide, I’d have strangled her first!’

Sometimes when I am cleaning the toilets, I remember the time we spent together and my chest becomes tight. I remember how your eyes shone in the darkness of your room and the spine-tingling caress of your words as you murmured, ‘If only I had been born a boy, Yi Moon. Then I could marry you one day.’ I remember the secret transactions our bodies made in your bed at night, and how your touch suffused every part of me with pleasure, unspoken of during the day. But now the Liya of that time no longer exists. Now you are a Red Guard, spreading terror throughout Beijing, and it’s as though that time never was.

Since the suicide of Teacher Zhao, toilet-cleaning duty has become a break from the chaos of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls, for in spite of the brave new Socialist claims to not fear ‘Heaven or Hell, Gods or ghosts’, old superstitions die hard and girls stay away from the ‘haunted’ toilet block in droves. I am not scared of Teacher Zhao’s ghost though. Every time I scrub the stall where she dangled from the pipes, I speak to her.