A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
Then one day in our after-breakfast political meeting, a student stood up and accused him of being a spy. The police came and pulled him away in handcuffs. Science class then sank to the same mind-numbing level as the other courses.
Also in the afternoons came military training. The “countryside/worker” students were given real guns and bullets with which to practice. Most others were considered bad security risks, and their studies were in theory rather than practice. I was allowed the real thing and became quite proficient at target practice, until someone began checking into my background. Then I abruptly was no longer permitted to handle real firearms, and joined the excluded in the theoretical use of weapons.
There was a point behind this. I and those like me had watched our fortunes decline under Communism. The country people and workers, on the other hand, were so miserable under the Old Regime that Communism was actually a small step up. Consequently they had a vested interest in its continuation, while we were considered under suspicion of harboring motives of revenge, so the Communists did not want firearms in our hands. Our files contained the identifying “Controlled Youth” label that meant we were to be watched and not trusted. No important positions were to be given us.
We were taught military science by an army officer stationed at our school specifically for that purpose. All he knew was the army and fighting. He could neither read nor write. Nonetheless, he was not the ogre one might have expected. He was friendly with the students, and unknowingly provided them with a great deal of entertainment.
Actually the entertainment came from his wife. She was a rather inelegant country woman brought along with him to take up residence at the school. She had a predilection for wandering about their rooms in her undergarments, a habit soon noticed with great excitement by the student body. It was not long before her windows were objects of intense youthful scrutiny, and she became the unwitting catalyst for endless juvenile speculations involving sex.
In the evenings came dinner. Huge wooden vats of rice were placed on the dining room floor, and students served themselves with giant ladles. The food was remarkably bad. Some steamed vegetables or paper-thin slices of meat were placed at each table. Because there were eight students per table, the vegetables or meat had to be divided into eight parts. This was a delicate process fraught with all kinds of social and political implications. Some of the more powerful students gave special consideration in the division to their friends or sex partners. I did not want any trouble, so I just took whatever amount fell to my lot. It was always small.
The well-off students supplemented their diet with all sorts of delicacies brought in from outside – food from their families or purchased in shops near the school. I was not so well off, but nonetheless my mother managed to supply me with thousand-year eggs or chili paste to stimulate my offended appetite. Without such added flavors the rice was hardly bearable. It was often infested with insects. Once a dead mouse was found in it.
Though most of the students were boys, there were a few girls as tokens of the “modern” Communist attitude toward the equality of the sexes. They were allowed to take classes with the boys and to eat with them. But the girls were given less food. Their living quarters were, of course separate. Some boys could not overcome their curiosity, one of my friends among them. He sneaked into the dressing area and secretly eyed the girls as they showered. He was discovered and sent to labor camp.
Like many adolescents, I was both pleased and made uncomfortable by the presence of girls. It seemed that I intimidated them and they intimidated me. My attitude toward sex had been formed largely by the Daoist and Buddhist leanings of my family. Masturbation was considered almost criminal, because through it one lost energy and damaged the body. Buddhism taught that the most beautiful of women is essentially just a skeleton. And in martial arts study, I learned that having sex was like using a knife to cut years from one’s life. I was interested in sex and interested in girls, but did nothing about it. Occasionally I would have a sex dream that left me feeling guilty and depressed.
I was aware that some books talked openly about sex, and even about sexual methods and tools – but I could not read them. My father would not even allow me to read love stories. But in spite of everything, I found girls both attractive and dangerously inviting. My only foray into romance, however, consisted of an odd, unspoken agreement I had with a delicately pretty girl. Each day we would sit at the same table to eat. We would arrive at the same time and leave at the same time. We never exchanged one word.
Some of the far more sexually sophisticated wealthy boys set up a sort of business in which they would rent out their pornographic magazines through a middle man. I knew what was going on, and it made me very curious. I too wanted to see what was in the exciting magazines, but could not bring myself to spend any of my meager funds on them, so I never saw what they contained. The foreign-born pornography king was eventually found out and was forced to transfer to another school. His middleman, much lower on the socio-economic scale and therefore more vulnerable, was put in jail. He was accused of encouraging anti-revolutionary social decay, and suffered a heavy punishment. Anyone who had looked at the magazines was forced to write a letter of confession and was suspended for a couple of weeks. Those of higher power status were excused. Those of lower were expelled.
To me the incident had been blown greatly out of proportion. It was just some teenagers expressing their curiosity about sex. But for some involved, it meant punishments ranging beyond expulsion to ten years in labor camp. I was appalled at the difference in punishment, and that it was based more on one’s family background than on the nature of the act.
Many of the boys did not bother to shower or clean up because there was no warm water. My solution was sneaking out at night and furtively making my way to the river for a swim. If lucky, I might be able to catch a frog, a snake or bird, and grill it over a fire near the river to satisfy my seemingly constant hunger, which was usually exacerbated during the day by watching the rich kids buy food at the roadside cafeteria on campus.
Officially, evenings were devoted to two hours of study, then lights out at 9:30. For some however, that was when the evening’s entertainments began – an aspect of school life in which I did not participate – covert homosexual relations.
We all slept together in the dormitory, sometimes two boys to a bed. The opaque mosquito nets over each bed gave opportunity not only for undetected study with a flashlight past hours, but also for sex among some of the boys. Often relationships formed between a young boy new to the school and an older boy assigned to be his guide and mentor. I found no attraction in this, but was repeatedly pressured to participate. I politely declined. That pestering finally came to a halt after a field trip to the countryside. One of the farm boys we encountered took a dislike to me, and kept harassing me until I beat some respect into him. After that there were no more homosexual overtures made to me at school.
My curious mind got me in trouble. One day a teacher was instructing us. “Communism,” he said, “is like Heaven. Capitalism is like Hell.” I turned this over and over in my mind. I felt I must be misunderstanding something, so I asked the teacher, “If Communism is like Heaven, why are the people leaving Communist East Germany to go to the West? Why are people leaving China for Hong Kong? Why do they want to leave Heaven and go to Hell?” My remark was really made in innocence. I was just looking for the explanation of this puzzle. But it was taken as a serious attack on Communist theory, and I was exposed to much unpleasant grilling to find out where I had picked up such an anti-revolutionary concept.
I was not the only student naive enough to get in trouble by ill-chosen comments. One student foolishly reported a dinner table conversation between his parents, in which they remarked on the shortage of cooking oil – that there seemed to be less and less as time passed, and there was not enough food. The student’s casual comments were reported to the police, and he was interrogated before the entire school. In their sly way, they told the boy his parents would not be taken away if he talked, and they added, “We always keep our promise.” They said that in front of everyone. The boy told all, and his parents were arrested and jailed. When news of the event spread through the school, I stood up and asked, “Why did the police not keep their promise?”
The reply was that the Revolution took precedence over everything. One could forget about promises for the benefit of the Revolution.