Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

One criticism that Ming would put to me with trembling lips (he obviously felt strongly about it) was "The masses have reported that you are aloof. You cut yourself off from the masses." It was common in China for people to assert that you were looking down on them if you failed to hide your desire for some solitude.

One level up from the student officials were the political supervisors, who also knew little or no English. They did not like me. Nor I them. From time to time I had to report my thoughts to the one in charge of my year, and before every session I would wander around the campus for hours summoning up the courage to knock on his door. Although he was not, I believed, an evil person, I feared him. But most of all I dreaded the inevitable tedious, ambiguous diatribe. Like many others, he loved playing cat and mouse to indulge his feeling of power. I had to look humble and earnest, and promise things I did not mean and had no intention of doing.

I began to feel nostalgia for my years in the countryside and the factory, when I had been left relatively alone. Universities were much more tightly controlled, being of particular interest to Mme Mao. Now I was among people who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. Without it, many of them would never have been here.

Once some students in my year were given the project of compiling a dictionary of English abbreviations. The department had decided that the existing one was 'reactionary' because, not surprisingly, it had far more 'capitalist' abbreviations than ones with an approved origin.

"Why should Roosevelt have an abbreviation FDR and not Chairman Mao?" some students asked indignantly. With tremendous solemnity they searched for acceptable entries, but eventually had to give up their 'historic mission' as there simply were not enough of the right kinds.

I found this environment unbearable. I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule.

We often had to leave the university to do things that were irrelevant to our subjects. Mao had said that we should 'learn things in factories, the countryside, and army units." What exactly we were meant to learn was, typically, unspecified. We started with 'learning in the countryside."

One week into the first term of my first year, in October 1973, the whole university was packed off to a place on the outskirts of Chengdu called Mount Dragon Spring, which had been the victim of a visit by one of China's vice-premiers, Chen Yonggui. He was previously the leader of a farming brigade called Dazhai in the mountainous northern province of Shanxi, which had become Mao's model in agriculture, ostensibly because it relied more on the peasants' revolutionary zeal than on material incentives.

Mao did not notice, or did not care, that Dazhai's claims were largely fraudulent. When Vice-Premier Chen visited Mount Dragon Spring he had remarked, "All, you have mountains here! Imagine how many fields you could create!" as if the fertile hills covered in orchards were like the barren mountains of his native village. But his remarks had the force of law. The crowds of university students dynamited the orchards that had provided Chengdu with apples, plums, peaches, and flowers. We transported stones from afar with pull carts and shoulder poles, for the construction of terraced rice paddies.

It was compulsory to demonstrate zeal in this, as in all actions called for by Mao. Many of my fellow students worked in a manner that screamed out for notice. I was regarded as lacking in enthusiasm, par fly because I had difficulty hiding my aversion to this activity, and partly because I did not sweat easily, no matter how much energy I expended. Those students whose sweat poured out in streams were invariably praised at the summing-up sessions every evening.

My university colleagues were certainly more eager than proficient. The sticks of dynamite they shoved into the ground usually failed to go off, which was just as well, as there were no safety precautions. The stone walls we built around the terraced edges soon collapsed, and by the time we left, after two weeks, the mountain slope was a wasteland of blast holes, cement solidified into shapeless masses, and piles of stones. Few seemed concerned about this.

The whole episode was ultimately a show, a piece of theater – a pointless means to a pointless end.

I loathed these expeditions and hated the fact that our labor, and our whole existence, was being used for a shoddy political game. To my intense irritation, I was sent off to an army unit, again with the whole university, in late 1974.

The camp, a couple of hours' truck journey from Chengdu, was in a beautiful spot, surrounded by rice paddies, peach blossoms, and bamboo groves. But our seventeen days there felt like a year. I was perpetually breathless from the long runs every morning, bruised from falling and crawling under the imaginary gunfire of 'enemy' tanks, and exhausted from hours of aiming a rifle at a target or throwing wooden hand grenades. I was expected to demonstrate my passion for, and my excellence at, all these activities, at which I was hopeless. It was unforgivable for me to be good only at English, my subject. These army tasks were political assignments, and I had to prove myself in them.

Ironically, in the army itself, good marksmanship and other military skills would lead to a soldier being condemned as 'white and expert."

I was one of the handful of students who threw the wooden hand grenades such a dangerously short distance that we were banned from the grand occasion of throwing the real thing. As our pathetic group sat on the top of a hill listening to the distant explosions, one girl burst into sobs. I felt deeply apprehensive too, at the thought of having given apparent proof of being 'white."

Our second test was shooting. As we marched onto the firing range, I thought to myself: I cannot afford to fail this, I absolutely have to pass. When my name was called and I lay on the ground, gazing at the target through the gunsight, I saw complete blackness. No target, no ground, nothing. I was trembling so much my whole body felt powerless. The order to fire sounded faint, as though it was floating from a great distance through clouds. I pulled the trigger, but I did not hear any noise, or see anything.

When the results were checked, the instructors were puzzled: none of my ten bullets had even hit the board, let alone the target.

I could not believe it. My eyesight was perfect. I told the instructor the gun barrel must be bent. He seemed to believe me: the result was too spectacularly bad to be entirely my fault. I was given another gun, provoking complaints from others who had asked, unsuccessfully, for a second chance. My second go was slightly better: two of the ten bullets hit the outer rings. Even so, my name was still at the bottom of the whole university. Seeing the results stuck on the wall like a propaganda poster, I knew that my 'whiteness' was further bleached. I heard snide remarks from one student official: "Humph! Getting a second chance! As if that would do her any good! If she has no class feelings, or class hatred, a hundred goes won't save her!"

In my misery, I retreated into my own thoughts, and hardly noticed the soldiers, young peasants in their early twenties, who instructed us. Only one incident drew my attention to them. One evening when some girls collected their clothes from the line on which they had hung them to dry, their knickers were unmistakably stained with semen.

In the university I found refuge in the homes of the professors and lecturers who had obtained their jobs before the Cultural Revolution, on academic merit. Several of the professors had been to Britain or the United States before the Communists took power, and I felt I could relax and speak the same language with them. Even so, they were cautious. Most intellectuals were, as the result of years of repression. We avoided dangerous topics. Those who had been to the West rarely talked about their time there.