.
I told him that.
His drippingly-sweet face froze instantly into cold severity. “I see you are not, as I thought, a good boy,” he said scornfully. “You don’t love your country enough! You don’t hate how foreigners exploit China and its people! You don’t have true proletarian revolutionary enthusiasm! I know you have suffered something from foreigners. You must remember it, and show your school how they tortured you!”
I was trapped and almost in tears. His accusations unnerved me and I did not know how to reply. “You must have suffered something!” he repeated. “You will stay in this room until you remember. Until you do, you will not go back to your class. You will not be allowed to go home until you recall what it was. I trust you. Don’t disappoint me!” He turned and left abruptly. I was alone.
I sat in that shadowed room lit only by a tiny window. My mind, like a roped horse, raced furiously, trying to find a way out of the dilemma. The tension was unbearable and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Nothing had happened. How could I say it had? When I told the truth he became angry and threatened me. Where was justice in all this?
Eventually the door opened and my tormentor returned. His eyes were hard. “Have you thought of anything yet?”
I could not say yes. I could not say no. So I said nothing.
He began talking again, in an odd tone that made me think his words and thoughts did not agree. “You must have suffered something in the past. Tell me, what was it that you remember? What really hurt you?
It came to me immediately. “Yes, I was slapped by my uncle.”
“So – ” he said, his icy voice melting again into syrup, “foreigners must have slapped some Chinese boys too.” Then his words led me farther, subtly indicating the way out of the trap in which he held me. As he talked a story began to form in my head, a vague picture in which a Chinese boy, while walking in the road, met a tall foreigner who, to show his scorn of China, had slapped the lad. And as the picture became clearer, that faceless boy took on my features.
That was it. That was what he wanted. I was to be the Chinese boy slapped by the arrogant foreigner.
The next day I represented my school in a large gathering at another educational institution. I was to go on stage and tell them all how I had been tortured by foreigners. For the first time I seemed to have lost my enthusiasm for acting. I was hesitant and suffering from a mixture of stage fright and guilt.
I stood up and hesitantly began recounting my false memory. My mind was in such conflict that I could not keep back the tears as I spit forth my first lie, which felt like filth in my mouth.
My tears had a most unexpected result. Far from seeing them as evidence of my reluctance and shame, the students and teachers took them as proof of the deep pain the fictional foreigner had caused me. They were quite moved, and when I left the stage another Party member came up and embraced me. “You have done a good thing for the Revolution,” he said. “You have made our meeting a real success! Now go home, take a couple of days, and rest. In ten days you will go to a bigger meeting to tell your story.”
When I reached home, I said nothing about what had happened, but because of the two days off and arrangements for the upcoming meeting, my father caught wind of something amiss. He went to the school to ask what it was all about. When told, he was furious, knowing I had lied. He refused to let me return to school.
Trouble piled on trouble. A couple of days later two comrades appeared at our house and insisted that I go to the meeting. My father was unbending, and told them bluntly that it was all a lie. This so irritated them that one asked suspiciously, “Who do you work for?” My father replied curtly that he worked for no one.
“Oh,” came the haughty reply, “so you are a parasite on the body of China!” My father hastily ended the conversation by saying that he intended to keep his son at home to teach him honesty. That obviously implied that at school I was taught to lie, which in this case was simply the truth.
I was punished by being denied dinner that night, though my mother surreptitiously had a servant slip some food in to me. The real punishment, the lasting punishment, was my bitter realization of my own moral failure.
My world was turning upside down. The values I had picked up at home were daily contradicted in school. Previously I had always dressed well and been careful about personal cleanliness. Now I was taught that these were “bourgeois” notions. We were encouraged to come to school with patched and dirty clothes, messy hair, unbrushed teeth, and bare feet. That I simply refused to do. Consequently I stood out in class in what was considered a most unbecoming way. Amid all those bare-footed, dirty boys there was only one with Vaseline-slicked hair and immaculately clean clothes, only one never lacking shoes and socks – me. Where once I had been admired, I was now jeered at and criticized as “not a member of the working class.” I considered such supposed admiration for filth and slovenliness an insult to the working class, because it implied that all workers had such disgusting personal habits, and that, I knew, was simply not true.
Whatever the class in school, the real subject was now politics. Marx and Engels were the new heroes. I often got into trouble because I asked too many questions. We were told that there were two ways of responding to individuals, depending on whether they were considered friends or enemies. For our friends there was the “democratic” response. But for our enemies the “dictatorship” response was appropriate. I asked why that should be. Were not all people to be treated the same before the law?
My question, they replied, was “false thinking.“ We could not treat our enemies the same as our friends.
That lesson was made clear to me by the now frequent arrival at our home of widows and orphans of “enemies” executed by the Communists. And every two or three days a truck loaded with people whose hands were tied behind their backs would pass our home. Other unfortunates – marked for capital punishment – were paraded around the city with notices tied to their backs. I watched as captives who cried out against their captors were struck in the head with rifle butts.
With my family telling me one thing and the school telling me another, I was very confused. Gradually I learned not only to depend more on my own judgment, but also to be wary of taking action in a world where values seemed to be in constant change.
My instructors told me Communists liberated people and made them happier than ever before, but my own eyes showed me that people were starving and being executed, and it was plain to me that living standards were lower than before the Revolution. I looked back with fond memories on the Western movies and magazines of my earlier years. I was particularly struck by a visitor from Hong Kong who brought my family some fine apples and oranges and a shiny new toothbrush. All such things had disappeared from Canton after the Revolution. And the visitor was well-groomed, as were apparently all people we encountered from Hong Kong. Such visitors were my tiny window on the outside world. Through them I could see that somewhere beyond China life was still normal.
Because I had experienced life before the Communists, I was the only child in our household permitted to listen when visitors from the outside world came or when politically dangerous matters were discussed. The others – my brother and sister – born after – had known nothing but life under Communism and could not be trusted. They believed the stories that those who were executed were evil, and that such killings made life more peaceful. They thought, as they were taught to think, that our present living standard was higher than before. But I, even with my few years, knew different.
Where was the bright future we were always being promised? Eventually I stopped asking such questions because there were no satisfying answers, and it only brought me trouble. While before I had been talkative and lively, I now grew silent and lonely.
In spite of my gloomy view of Communism, I nonetheless believed that the Communists were sincerely interested in fighting for working-class people and wanted justice and fairness. I actually admired them until I had a most discouraging experience.
The