The Red Guards and the Violinist
THERE WAS A STYLISH, YOUTHFUL–LOOKING MAN NAMED Wang whom I met one day in Shanghai. It turned out that we were both born in the same year — the Year of the Snake (but Wang used the Chinese euphemism for snake, “little dragon”). He was so friendly and full of stories that I saw him often, usually for lunch at the Jin Jiang Hotel. He was a sensitive soul, but had a sense of irony, too, and said he had never been happier than when he was walking the streets of San Francisco on his one trip to America — he hinted that he was eager to emigrate to the United States, but he never became a bore on the subject and did not ask me for help. He was unusual, even in Shanghai, for his clothes — a canary-yellow French jacket and pale blue slacks, a gold watch, a chain around his neck, and expensive sunglasses.
“I like bright clothes,” he said.
“Could you wear them during the Cultural Revolution?”
He laughed and said, “What a mess that was!”
“Were you criticized?”
“I was under arrest. That’s when I started smoking. I discovered that if you smoked it gave you time to think. They had me in a room — the Red Guards. They said, ‘You called Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a crazy lady.’ She was a crazy lady! But I just lit a cigarette and puffed on it so that I could think of something to say.”
“What did you say?”
“The wrong thing! They made me write essays. Self-criticism!”
“Describe the essays.”
“They gave me subjects. ‘Why I Like Charles Dickens,’ ‘Why I Like Shakespeare.’ ”
“I thought you were supposed to say why you didn’t like them.”
“They wouldn’t believe that,” he said. “They called me a reactionary. Therefore, I had to say why I liked them. It was awful. Six pages every night, after work unit, and then they said, ‘This is dog shit — write six more pages.’ ”
“What work did you do?”
“Played the violin in the Red Orchestra. Always the same tunes. ‘The East Is Red,’ ‘Long Live the Thoughts of Mao,’ ‘Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,’ all that stuff. They made me play in the rain. I said, ‘I can’t — the violin will fall apart.’ They don’t know that a violin is glued together. I played in the rain. It fell apart. They gave me another one and ordered me to play under the trees during the Four Pests Campaign — to keep sparrows from landing in the branches.”
The other three pests were mosquitoes, flies, and rats.
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“We painted Huai Hai Lu — that’s more absurd,” Wang said.
“How can you paint a street?” I asked — the street he named was one of the main thoroughfares of Shanghai.
“We painted it red, out of respect for Chairman Mao,” Wang said. “Isn’t that stupid?”
“How much of the street did you paint?”
“Three and a half miles,” Wang said, and laughed, remembering something else. “But there were stupider things. When we went to the work unit, we always did the qing an [salute] to Mao’s portrait on the gateway. We’d hold up the Red Book, say, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao,’ and salute him. Same thing when we went home. People would make things in Mao’s honor, like a knitted Mao emblem, or a red star in needlepoint, and put it in the special Respect Room at the unit — it was painted red. That was for Mao. If they wanted to prove they were very loyal, they would wear the Mao badge by pinning it to their skin.”
“That must have impressed the Red Guards,” I said.
“It wasn’t just the Red Guards — everyone blames them, but everyone was in it. That’s why people are so embarrassed at the moment, because they realize they were just as stupid about Chairman Mao as everyone else. I know a banker who was given the job of fly catcher. He had to kill flies and save their little bodies in a matchbox. Every afternoon someone would come and count the dead flies and say, ‘One hundred seventeen — not good enough. You must have one hundred twenty-five tomorrow.’ And more the day after, you see? The government said there was going to be a war. ‘The enemy is coming — be prepared.’ ”
“Which enemy?”
“The imperialists — Russia, India, the United States. It didn’t matter which one. They were going to kill us,” Wang said, and rolled his eyes. “So we had to make bricks for the war effort. Ninety bricks a month for each person. But my parents were old, so I had to make their bricks. I used to come home from the unit, write my essay ‘Why I Like Western Music,’ and make bricks — I had to deliver two hundred seventy a month. And they were always asking me about my hole.”
“Your hole?”
“The Shen wa dong — Dig Deep Holes edict. That was for the war, too. Everyone had to have a hole, in case of war. Every so often the Red Guards would knock on your door and say, ‘Where is your hole?’ ”
He said there were bomb shelters all over Shanghai, which had been built on Mao’s orders (“for the coming war”), and of course they had never been used. I asked him to show me one. We found this subterranean vault — it was just like a derelict subway station — on 1157 Nanjing Road, and it had been turned into an ice-cream parlor. The fascinating thing to me was that it was now obviously a place where young folks went to kiss their girlfriends. It was full of Chinese youths locked in the half nelson they regard as an amorous embrace. The irony was not merely that these kids were making out and feeling each other up in a place that had been built by frantic and paranoid Red Guards in the 1960s, but also that it was now called the Dong Chang Coffee Shop and owned and operated by the government.
I was talking to Wang one day about my trip through the Soviet Union when I mentioned how the scarcity of consumer goods there meant they were always pestering foreigners for blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, and so forth.
“That never happens in China,” I said.
“No,” Wang said. “But that reminds me. About three years ago there was a Russian ballet dancer at the hotel in Shanghai. I went to see the ballet — fabulous! And this dancer was very handsome. I recognized him, and he smiled at me. Then he pointed to my track shoes and pointed to himself. He wanted them, I understood that. They were expensive shoes — Nike, cost me fifty yuan. But I don’t care much about money. We measured feet, side by side. Exact fit. I don’t speak a word of Russian, but I could tell he really wanted those shoes.”
“Did you sell them to him?”
“I gave them to him,” Wang said, and frowned at the triviality of it. “I felt sorry for someone who just wanted a pair of shoes. It seemed sad to me that he couldn’t get them in his own country. I took them off and walked to my office barefoot! He was really happy! I thought: He’ll go back to Russia. He’ll always remember this. He’ll say, ‘Once I was in China. I met a Chinese man and asked him for his shoes, and he gave them to me!’ ”
A moment later, he said, “You can get anything you want in China. Food, clothes, shoes, bicycles, motorbikes, TVs, radios, antiques. If you want girls, you can find girls.” And then in a wide-eyed way, “Or boys — if you want boys.”
“Or fashion shows.”
“They have fashion shows on television almost every week,” Wang said. “Shanghai is famous for them.”
I asked him what the old people made of these developments — hookers and high fashion in a country where just a few years ago foreign decadence was condemned and everyone wore baggy blue suits.
“The old people love life in China now,” Wang said. “They are really excited by it. Very few people object. They had felt very repressed before.”