“Love might have come late, but its arrival made all the difference.
“The cadre school was located in a marshland in Qingpu. There was no library nor any movie theaters nearby. Instead of staying in the dorm room, they started to walk out, openly, arm in arm. For lovers, to be is to be with each other.
“Yang was in his mid-fifties. Except for a pair of broken eyeglasses, he looked like an old farmer, weather-beaten, white-haired like an owl, and with a pronounced suggestion of a stoop. As for Yin, she was still in her early thirties. Though not a beauty, she was animated with passion, blossoming beside him. To people’s confusion, it was she who clung to him with abandon.
“His white hair shone against her rosy cheeks, just as described in a well-known proverb. But that proverb was commonly considered to be negative, with an implication that such a couple was unsuitable. What the lovers saw in each other was, of course, a matter of opinion. They were both single. There was nothing legally against them being together, but that was the least of it since, at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao had called for the demolition of the bourgeois legal system.
“Still, it should have been no one else’s business. But it turned out to be.
“She was not popular. Some of the people in the school had suffered mistreatment by her when she was a Red Guard. Also, the cadre school authorities were upset. A political scandal might develop. Instead of reforming themselves in the cadre school, they had fallen in love. It was politically outrageous, for the concept of romantic love was a political taboo in the early seventies. It implied a decadent detraction from one’s dedication to Chairman Mao and the Party.
“They did not try to keep their love affair a secret, which proved to be too naive of them.”
As Peiqin started leafing through the book, Yu said, “Yes, there’s not a married couple in the eight modern revolutionary Beijing operas-with the exception of Madame Aqin, whose husband is conveniently away on business. It is all political fervor, there are no personal feelings in those operas.”
“Here is what I was looking for,” Peiqin said, shifting to a more comfortable position. “Let me read a few paragraphs to you.”
They were in a world where there was nothing they could take for granted. No certitude. No reliability. No conviction.
Except him in her, and her in him.
After a day’s labor, he would sometimes read poems to her, in Chinese, and then in English, behind the cadre school pigsty, or on a ridge in the rice paddy, their hands soil-covered, a broken loudspeaker repeating Chairman Mao’s quotations in the air, black crows hovering over the deserted field.
The Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, they realized, in which each and every individual was smashed to pieces, “burned to ashes,” as in a revolutionary slogan. For them, however, it was as if they had been reborn out of the ashes.
“A terrible beauty is born,” he said. “There will be a new future for the people, for the country.”
He especially liked a poem entitled “You and I,” written by a woman poet named Guan Daosheng in the thirteenth century. The passion was expressed quite directly, as was seldom seen, according to him, in classical Chinese poetry.
After having finished reading the long quote in an emotion-suffused voice, Peiqin said “But such a passion was hardly comprehensible in the cadre school. What’s worse, it was a passion viewed by one of the school leaders as a brazen challenge to the Party authorities.
“So a mass criticism meeting was held. Yang was marched onto a temporary stage and denounced as a negative example of the reactionary intellectual who resisted ideological reform by falling in love. Yin’s lot was hardly better: in addition to a serious inner-Party warning, she was ordered to stand barefoot beside him on the stage. She did not wear a blackboard; she bore a halter of ragged shoes around her neck, a time-honored symbol of shame, of being worn out after being used by numerous men, like the dirty shoes.
“There is a famous quotation by Chairman Mao, There is no groundless love or hatred in this world. There must have been a reason for the two ‘black elements’ embracing each other, their revolutionary critics said. It must have been out of their common hatred of the Cultural Revolution, the critics concluded.
“Yin and Yang remained defiant, continuing to meet each other, whenever and wherever possible, despite the repeated warnings of the cadre school authorities.
“He was then put into an ‘isolation room,’ deprived of all contact with the outside world and Yin. He was ordered to write confessions and self-criticisms all day long. He refused to do so, declaring that there was nothing wrong in one human being loving another. After a week, he was marched out to work for extra-long hours in the rice paddy during the day, then sent back to the isolation room to write in the evening.
“She, too, suffered terribly Half her hair was shaved off down to the scalp-in a special style called the Yin-Yang haircut, designed for class enemies-a cruel play on the coincidence of their family names. She did not even bother to wear a hat, as if proud of the price she had had to pay for her passion.
“What’s worse, she was not allowed to see Yang. After a day’s work, she could only wander, alone, around the hut in which he was kept, hoping to catch a glimpse of his silhouette against the window. She kept repeating the lines he had taught her, ‘What a starry night this, / but not that night, long ago, lost. / For whom do I find myself standing here, / against the wind and the frost / deep in the night?’
“Not long afterward, Yang fell sick again. Because of his lack of cooperation with the school authorities, they made it hard for him to get proper treatment. The barefoot doctor believed that a silver acupuncture needle could cure any illness, because Chairman Mao said that traditional Chinese medicine could perform miracles. Yin was denied the right to visit him until the very last day of his life, when everybody could see that he was beyond hope. It was a cold day, and his hands in hers were even colder. All his roommates left the room, making one excuse or another, leaving the two of them together. Holding her hand, he remained conscious to the end, even though he was no longer able to speak. He died in his dorm room, in her arms. As a poem Yang had translated says: ‘If only your body, cold as ice, as snow, / could be brought back life / by the warmth of mine…’
“Two years later, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. The cadre school dissolved. She went back to her college. Because of the English she had learned from him, she was assigned to teach English.
“As for Yang, it was officially declared that he had died a natural death. He had not been executed or beaten to death like some intellectuals, so there was no need to look into the specific circumstances of his last days. So many had died during those years. No one bothered. Nothing was done about him in the first few years after the Cultural Revolution.