Though you ignore me, I know I am your most intimate friend. Though at school I am as ostracized as ever, the spring of 1966 is the happiest of my life.
We spend every Saturday night together until May, when I don’t see you for three weekends in a row. There are rumours that the Party has handed down directives to the student leaders to be more revolutionary. There are rumours of a coming political storm. And I know these Party commands are keeping you away.
The first Saturday in June you knock for me, exhausted after a ten-hour Youth League meeting. The evening is hot, and we go to Ironmongers Lane and soak in a tub of tepid water. When I ask you about the rumours, you say, ‘There’s going to be a reform of the education system. I am prohibited from saying any more than that. But don’t worry, Moon. I will keep you safe.’
After dinner, we lie on your bed and go to sleep. Hours later I am woken by the floorboards creaking as you pace up and down, lost in thought. The moon-cast shadows of the tree outside the window reach across your body, the branches stroking your breasts and hips and reaching as though to strangle your neck. I drift off again, and wake before daybreak to see you kneeling by the loose floorboard and staring at the black and white photo of your dead mother. Are you too excited to sleep? Or too scared?
I am scared. In every political campaign, it’s the rightists who suffer most.
II
On Monday when I arrive at school the playground is crowded with girls gazing up at large sheets of paper dripping with black ink pasted to the gate and the school walls.
Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.
Time for a Revolution in Education.
The Rightist Intellectual Headteacher Yang Must No Longer Dominate Our School with Her Capitalist Agenda.
We stare at the posters, confused. Who vandalized the playground? Where are the teachers? Why hasn’t the bell rung for lessons? Only the Youth League members look as though they know what is going on. You and Long March, Red Star and Patriotic Hua stand with authority, watching your classmates’ reactions to the slogans in black ink.
‘Why hasn’t the bell rung?’ someone asks.
‘Lessons are cancelled,’ Long March says.
‘But the high school entrance exams are next month,’ complains Ying Le, who wants to go to medical school and train to be a doctor. ‘How are we supposed to study for them?’
‘The high school entrance exams have been abolished!’ Long March snaps. ‘The education system is being reformed. The teachers have been teaching the revisionist anti-Party line for long enough!’
You stand on the stage in the auditorium in front of hundreds of girls. Your hair has been shorn like a boy’s and you wear a PLA jacket over your uniform. You look very military and tough as you hold a loudspeaker to your mouth and say, ‘We have it on good authority that there are Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts on the faculty of our school.’
There are outraged gasps. Fearful murmurs. Confusion. Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts are spirits from folktales and myths that assume human form and do mischief. Do you really believe that our teachers are evil spirits?
‘Many of our teachers are counter-revolutionaries,’ you say, ‘pretending to support the Party while indoctrinating us with the anti-Party line. The education system must be reformed to weed these bad elements out. Until the Cultural Revolution Committee decides upon the next course of action, all teachers have been suspended.’
The whispers of hundreds of girls sweep through the auditorium, as though your words are a strong breeze rustling the leaves of a tree. ‘The teachers are suspended?’ ‘What about exams?’ ‘What’s the Cultural Revolution?’
‘Class time will now be devoted to revolutionary activities,’ you say through the crackling loudspeaker. ‘Every student is to give her blood, sweat and tears to the Cultural Revolution!’
Long March strides towards you on the stage and you hand the loudspeaker over to her. ‘The black-category students, with rightist, landlord or capitalist blood lineage will not participate in the revolutionary activities!’ she says. ‘The black-category students will be segregated to the back of every classroom. They will study the collected works of Mao Zedong. They will write self-criticisms and reform their thinking!’
Standing beside Long March, you nod as though in agreement. You nod as though our segregation is fair and right.
Our classroom becomes a Big-character Poster production line. Black ink smudges the faces and hands of nearly every student as they use calligraphy brushes to make posters denouncing our former teachers. Red Star has been appointed a ‘Big-character Poster Inspector’ and Ying Le’s poster does not meet her standards.
‘“Teacher Zhao Must Evict Any Thoughts that Contradict the Party Line from Her Heart. .”’ Red Star reads scornfully. ‘What’s this meant to be? A love poem?’
‘But I can’t think of any anti-Party crimes Teacher Zhao has committed,’ Ying Le says honestly. ‘She was a dedicated Communist.’
‘Stop thinking like an intellectual and think like a rebel,’ Red Star scolds. ‘Teacher Zhao deceived us into thinking she was a loyal Communist when really she was teaching us her revisionist curriculum!’
Ying Le bows her head. She wants to be a doctor, not a rebel. Red Star snatches the calligraphy brush from her and scrawls, ‘Teacher Zhao Must Be Torn Limb from Limb for Challenging the Doctrine of Chairman Mao!’
‘There!’ she says. ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and you, Dr Ying, better hurry up and learn which end goes bang. Or I’ll put you at the back of class with those Stinking Rightists over there.’ Red Star looks over at the black-category students, and catches me looking up from my desk. ‘Who gave you permission to look at me?’ she snaps. ‘Take your beady little capitalist eyes off me!’
I bury my head back in my exercise book.
Industriously Study Mao Zedong Thought, as Mao Zedong Thought is the Sole Criterion of Truth.
Long March has ordered us to write this ten thousand times without mistakes, and I have just completed my hundredth line. If Mao Zedong Thought is the sole criterion of truth, I think, then what about the five thousand years of civilization before Chairman Mao? For five thousand years was everything false? Of course, I keep my doubts to myself.
‘Women hold up half the sky. Women are as revolutionary as men. We of the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls reject femininity. We will roll up our sleeves and spit and curse! We won’t bathe or wash our clothes. Soap is bourgeois! The sweat of the masses is revolutionary! We will breed dirt under our fingernails and behind our ears! We will emancipate ourselves from the shackles of our sex!’
Waving scissors above her head, Little Miao lectures us from the teaching platform. Miao has no problem ‘rejecting femininity’, as for years Miao has been as aggressive, foul-mouthed and unwashed as the roughest of boys. Shopkeepers call her ‘young man’, and children in the street call her ‘Elder Brother’. Proud to be a tomboy, Little Miao never corrects their mistake. And now, scissors in hand, she intends for the rest of us to ‘reject femininity’ too.