I was in the fourth grade when she came to our school. At a glance you could tell she was a recent college graduate. She looked shy and timid. In the beginning, whenever she spoke, not only her cheeks but also her ears turned red. She was a charming young woman, tall and slender, her hands very delicate with long, thin fingers. Her dark eyes were as sensitive as though they were always ready to be in tears. At that time, in the middle of the revolution, we had no sense of beauty. As one of the slogans says: “Sweet flowers are poisonous.” To us, Wenli was someone dangerous rather than pretty. But I remember I liked looking at her in profile; in that way she reminded me of the ballerinas in the revolutionary model play The Red Women Detachment. Certainly Wenli never wore a uniform; besides, her lips were thicker and the tip of her small nose too round, lacking the stern looks of a woman soldier.
She taught music in her first year. The class mainly consisted of two parts: the songs praising Chairman Mao or composed for the quotations from him; the dances expressing our loyalty to the Chairman and the Party. Though she was knowledgeable about music and was even able to compose a song, Wenli’s voice was much too soft and too weak for those revolutionary songs. We believed we sang better than she, because our voices were more sincere and passionate. But she was a wonderful dancer. Standing on one toe, she could raise the other leg slowly back and forth with ease, as if it had no weight. She could stretch out her arms with a lot of grace and poise. We all enjoyed watching her dance, though she didn’t seem to have the strength for a loyalty dance, the vigorous kind we did on the streets. Soon we learned that she came from a capitalist family in Shanghai. No wonder she looked so delicate and fragile.
One day at noon, Niu Fen and I went to see Miao Jian, the teacher in charge of our class, whose office was on the second floor in White Mansion. On the last flight of the stairs we heard someone singing. The slow, dangling tune was so different from anything we had heard that both of us stopped to listen. It was Wenli’s voice. Gradually we took in the words:
Why are flowers so red?
So red and so beautiful?
O so red, O so beautiful,
Like a fire,
Like a fire
That burns the blood
Of youth and love—
The wind must have blown open the door of her office. She stopped. Niu Fen and I entered the corridor and found Wenli holding the doorknob. She saw us and smiled nervously, her lips twitching slightly and her eyes full of sparkling tears.
“Can I help you, Aina?” she asked me. I shook my head, too confused by her tearful eyes to say anything. One of my bobby pins came loose and I stuck it back in my hair.
“What’s that song, Teacher Zhu?” Niu Fen, who was a loudmouth, asked.
“A Uigur folk song,” Wenli said. “I, I sang it just for fun.”
I don’t know whether Niu Fen reported Wenli to the school leaders. After that, I never heard her sing the song again, and she only sang the revolutionary songs she taught us in class. But somehow the tune of that folk song remained in my mind; from time to time it rose in my ears. Later I came upon its music and words at a friend’s home in Dalian and learned to sing it myself.
Our class teacher Maio Jian was a young man. Some people called him “Little Albanian,” because of his big round eyes, aquiline nose, and small stature. In no way did he look Chinese. His face was very lean and he had to shave every day to keep his whiskers down. It was said that he had mixed blood. People thought him handsome, perhaps because he looked exotic. I had no idea when he and Wenli started their love affair. In any case, we soon noticed they were often together. Later Wenli had appendicitis and was operated upon. During her recovery Miao visited her every day.
One afternoon in the fall Niu Fen, Zhang Wei, and I went to Miao’s office to get some pamphlets for the class. On his door hung a sign, “No Admittance,” which had never been there before. We were uncertain if he was in, but we heard a noise inside. The three of us pressed our eyes on the cracks of the door to see what was going on. Both Miao and Wenli were standing by the window, but Wenli, her hips leaning against a desk, was unbuckling her belt.
“Just let me have a peek,” Miao said softly.
Outside we three looked at each other and stuck our tongues out. Then we heard Wenli say, “Just a peek, promise?”
“I promise.”
She pulled down her pants a little and revealed her white belly. “Lower, lower,” Miao urged.
The pants went down further, and a scar like a caterpillar, about three inches long, appeared close to her right groin. Miao touched the dark skin with his index finger, then bent down and kissed the scar. “Naughty, you’re a naughty boy,” Wenli said happily and pulled up her pants.
Bewildered by what we witnessed, the three of us turned around simultaneously and dashed to the head of the stairs as though escaping provoked hornets. Our footsteps must have startled them, for I heard Miao cry, “Oh heaven!”
Either Niu Fen or Zhang Wei told on them. Next morning we were summoned to the office of the school’s Revolutionary Committee. The leaders asked us to describe what we had seen and heard; without hesitation we told them all the details. We thought our teachers had done something bad and shameful, but we had no idea how serious it was. Director Liu said the two teachers were corrupt to the bones by bourgeois lifestyle.
In three days our school was covered with big-character posters exposing and condemning Miao Jian and Zhu Wenli. Many articles appeared on the walls and billboards, such as “Root Out the Bourgeois Lifestyle,” “It’s Shameless to Open Your Pants in the Office,” “Why Do You Still Behave like a Hoodlum?” “Zhu Wenli: the Stinking Bourgeois Miss,” “New China Does Not Tolerate the Incorrigible Progeny of Capitalists.” In the music class two days later, Wenli looked very pale, her eyes swollen and her voice a little hoarse. She tried to teach a song that expressed the Tibetans’ love for Chairman Mao, but we weren’t very interested. Quite a few students made faces at each other. Two boys even buckled and unbuckled their belts with meaningful noise.
Then Miao was sent to the country to be reformed through labor in the fields. Wenli was assigned to take over our class. She didn’t teach music anymore, because one of the school leaders had complained that she sounded as though wailing when singing a song which should be full of gusto, in accordance with the courageous spirit of the proletariat. Most students in our class were children of poor peasants, workers, and cadres, so it was not easy for Wenli to teach us. But unlike the boys, who often made insinuating remarks about her family background or imitated her voice, a number of girls were good to her, because they liked the way she danced and wanted her to teach them how to dance. Since I was clumsy, not cut out for dancing, I was never close to her. I noticed she seldom spoke to anyone outside class. A few wrinkles, very thin, appeared at the ends of her eyes. Her hair was no longer as tidy as before.
After the Spring Festival we began to study a new lesson in our Chinese class. The text was a letter Chairman Mao had written to the Albanian Communist Party. As usual, Wenli led us to read it out three times, and then she started to explain the new words and expressions. In the letter, there was a sentence that went like this: “You (the Albanian Communist Party) are a grand eagle soaring bravely; in comparison, the Russian Revisionists and the American Imperialists are merely a pile of yellowish dirt.”
Wenli said to the class, “Chairman Mao here uses a metaphor. Who knows what a metaphor is?”